A court ruled against the Trump administration by dismissing the criminal case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams with prejudice on Wednesday. This means that the Department of Justice cannot bring those charges back at any point in the future.

The decision by Judge Dale Ho rejected the Justice Department’s request to dismiss the case against Adams without prejudice. This would have allowed them to hang those charges over the mayor’s head in order to pressure him to do the administration’s bidding on immigration policies.

“In light of DOJ’s rationales, dismissing the case without prejudice would create the unavoidable perception that the Mayor’s freedom depends on his ability to carry out the immigration enforcement priorities of the administration, and that he might be more beholden to the demands of the federal government than to the wishes of his own constituents,” Ho wrote.

Adams was charged with multiple felony corruption charges in 2024, but the Trump administration quickly moved to dismiss the case by arguing, without evidence, that the prosecution was somehow tainted and that the mayor needed to be free from criminal indictment in order to enact the administration’s deportation agenda.

Ho firmly rejected these rationales as “unsupported by any objective evidence.”

“There is no evidence ― zero ― that [prosecutors] had any improper motives. ... All of this suggests that the “appearances of impropriety” rationale is not just thin, but pretextual,” Ho wrote.