Milbank LLP, representing the New Jersey cities of Newark and Hoboken, secured the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by the US Department of Justice in the US District Court for the District of New Jersey claiming that the cities unlawfully obstructed federal immigration enforcement. A little over a year after the suit was filed, the court agreed with the cities and dismissed the DOJ’s complaint without prejudice.
On May 22, 2025, DOJ filed suit against the cities of Newark, Hoboken, Jersey City and Paterson, along with their city councils, city council presidents, and mayors, alleging that the cities’ policies that limited local cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement violated the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution because they are preempted by federal law and violate the intergovernmental immunity doctrine.
On behalf of Newark and Hoboken, Milbank moved to dismiss, arguing that the federal government lacked Article III standing because the cities' local policies imposed identical requirements to those mandated by the New Jersey Attorney General's statewide Immigrant Trust Directive. The cities asserted that any alleged injury was not traceable to their independent policies and could not be redressed by striking down the municipal policies alone because the statewide directive would continue to apply to the cities regardless of the outcome of the DOJ’s suit.
Milbank further argued that the policies were not preempted, relying on binding Third Circuit precedent that had previously upheld the state directive, and that the Tenth Amendment's anti-commandeering doctrine barred the federal government from compelling local law enforcement to administer federal civil immigration programs.
On June 24, 2026, US District Judge Evelyn Padin dismissed the lawsuit, finding that “the Federal Government's case has a fundamental flaw—it treats the Challenged Policies as though they operate in isolation. They do not.” Judge Padin further wrote that, “New Jersey's statewide Immigrant Trust Directive limits voluntary cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement beyond what the law requires” and that because that directive had already been challenged and upheld in both the District of New Jersey and the Third Circuit, enjoining the cities' policies could provide no concrete relief. The court also observed that the federal government had previously sought to invalidate the Immigrant Trust Directive and could not use this case to obtain indirectly what it had failed to obtain directly. Accordingly, the court dismissed the complaint in its entirety.
The Milbank team was led by Litigation & Arbitration partners Gurbir S. Grewal (who previously served as Attorney General of the State of New Jersey), Neal Katyal and Colleen Roh Sinzdak, with associate Kristina Alekseyeva and law clerk Keith Penney.
