ON ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION, IT’S TRUMP FILING THE LAWSUITS. One of the main themes of resistance to the not-yet-1-month-old administration of President Donald Trump is the reliance on lawsuits (often filed with friendly judges) as the president’s adversaries try to kneecap his policy initiatives. So far, the court strategy has had a lot of at least temporary success because we have seen one injunction after another ordering the Trump administration to stop doing this or that.

Now Trump is fighting back with some lawsuits of his own on the critical issue of illegal immigration. In the past week, the Justice Department has filed suits against the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois and also against the state of New York and Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY), as well as New York Attorney General Letitia James. You may remember James as a particularly zealous Trump-suer, having won a $454 million judgment against him in a property valuation case that many observers felt had little or no merit.

At issue this time are Illinois’s and New York’s sanctuary policies. In both states, “sanctuary” does not just mean that local officials do not prosecute illegal immigrants, and it does not mean only that local officials do not help federal officials prosecute illegal immigrants. In both states, “sanctuary” means local officials actively obstruct federal officials from enforcing federal immigration law.

There’s a big difference there. As the New York lawsuit notes, “The United States is facing a crisis of illegal immigration. And the federal government is set to put a stop to it. While states are welcome partners in that effort, it is their prerogative as separate sovereigns to refrain. But a state’s freedom to stand aside is not a freedom to stand in the way. And where inaction crosses into obstruction, a state breaks the law. The state of New York is doing just that.” In the Illinois suit, the Justice Department says the state and Chicago are engaging in an “intentional effort to obstruct the federal government’s enforcement of federal immigration law.”

How, specifically, do they do that? One law cited by the Illinois lawsuit is a Chicago ordinance that, in the words of the suit, “explicitly and intentionally limits local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement in various ways. It provides that no city agent or agency shall ‘detain, or continue to detain a person based upon an immigration detainer’ or ‘an administrative warrant.’ … Moreover, no city agent shall permit ICE agents ‘access, including by telephone, to a person being detained by, or in the custody of, the city agency or agent,’ or ‘use of city agency facilities for investigative interviews or other investigative purposes. Nor shall city agents ‘expend their time responding to ICE inquiries or communicating with ICE regarding a person’s custody status, release date, or contact information. … ‘Unless required to do so by statute, federal regulation, court order, or a lawfully issued judicial warrant, no city agent or agency shall request, maintain, or share the citizenship or immigration status of any person unless such disclosure has been authorized in writing by the individual to whom such information pertains, or if such individual is a minor or is otherwise not legally competent, by such individual’s parent or guardian.”

You get the idea. If an illegal immigrant breaks the law in Illinois, the state and the city of Chicago will do everything in their power to block federal authorities from doing anything about it.

The New York lawsuit focuses on something called the “Green Light Law.” First, it allows illegal immigrants to get a state driver’s license without having a Social Security number or any proof of legal presence in the United States. In fact, it allows an illegal immigrant to present a driver’s license from another country to get a New York state driver’s license.

Then, the Green Light Law bars state authorities from sharing any Department of Motor Vehicles information — information like addresses, car registrations, and ID photos, which can be critical in criminal investigations — with the federal government. And this, from the lawsuit: The law “requires New York’s DMV Commissioner to promptly tip off any illegal alien when a federal immigration agency has requested his or her information.” That is a jaw-dropping benefit to illegal immigrant criminals.

It is all intentional, according to the Justice Department lawsuit. “As its supporters and sponsors made clear, the Green Light Law was passed to directly impair the enforcement of the federal immigration laws in New York. And those lawmakers have achieved their objective. DMV information is critical to federal immigration agencies — in particular their ability to identify and remove those who are here illegally. As important, DMV information is critical to keeping federal immigration officers safe. From vehicle stops to border crossings to executing arrests and searches, immigration authorities depend on these records to assess real-time the situations they face and the people they encounter. But New York’s Green Light Law deprives them of this insight; and in turn unnecessarily forces brave law enforcement officers into dangerous and uncertain circumstances.” 

All of this violates the Constitution’s supremacy clause, the lawsuit says. The supremacy clause says the “Constitution and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, any thing in the Constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.”

The short version of that, from the National Constitution Center: “The core message of the Supremacy Clause is simple: the Constitution and federal laws (of the types listed in the first part of the Clause) take priority over any conflicting rules of state law.”

And that is what the Trump administration is arguing as it takes on sanctuary jurisdictions across the country and specifically in Illinois and New York. Of course both states have defenses. In New York, Hochul vowed to protect illegal immigrant suspects’ private information from “federal agents, or Elon Musk’s shadowy DOGE operation,” which signaled she is ready to wage a political fight. She also argued that the Green Light Law “allows federal immigration officials to access any DMV database with a judicial warrant,” as if requiring federal officials to go to court for everyday criminal investigation information needed in real time is not obstruction. 

So a new front in the fight over Trump policies has opened up, this one with the Trump administration doing the suing. With so many administration lawyers playing defense in other lawsuits, Republicans will be happy to see the administration playing offense in this case.