The Sanctuary Lawsuits Keep Losing. The Enforcement Keeps Going.

The Justice Department has sued states over sanctuary policies in Colorado, New Jersey, and Illinois, and every one of those cases has been dismissed on Tenth Amendment grounds — the principle that the federal government cannot commandeer state officials to carry out its programs ^[1][2]. The Illinois case appears to have met the same fate, according to coverage of the Colorado and New Jersey dismissals ^[1][2]. And still the filings keep coming: 21 states over in-state tuition for undocumented students, 29 states over unredacted voter rolls, Minnesota and Oregon over sanctuary policies ^[3][4][5]. As a legal strategy, this makes no sense. Zero wins, only dismissals. That futility is the signal to look at what else is happening at the same time. Three things, running in parallel. The first is the litigation track, and it just escalated. This week, the Office of Legal Counsel issued a binding opinion overturning a 1998 Clinton-era interpretation and requiring every state agency — not only the ones that administer benefits — to report undocumented immigrants to DHS, conditioning $16.5 billion in TANF block grants on cooperation ^[6]. The tuition suits and the sanctuary challenges run the same template: the state refuses, then the DOJ files, arguing the Supremacy Clause makes state-level protections non-compliant with federal law ^[7]. The second is the money. DHS slashed Homeland Security Grant funding to Democratic-led states that refused to use local police for immigration enforcement. New York's allocation dropped 86%, from $187 million to $30 million ^[8]. The third is the one that doesn't need any of the above to succeed. Federalized National Guard troops deployed to at least five cities under Title 10 status, at an estimated cost of $340 million ^[9]. The IRS sharing taxpayer address data with ICE for 1.28 million people ^[10]. Treasury urging banks and casinos to report 18 "red flags" of undocumented employment to FinCEN and ICE ^[11]. Palantir's ImmigrationOS, a $30 million contract to streamline identification and deportation ^[12]. And in Carroll County, Maryland, a sheriff who replaced a banned 287(g) agreement with an internal policy that, by his own account, looks much the same as the formal one ^[13]. None of this requires a state to cooperate. None of it waits on a judge. Tom Homan made the logic explicit to New York's governor.

I told Governor Hochul, if you lock us out of the jails now we have to go to the streets and find the bad guy and when we find the bad guy or in the process of finding the bad guy we're going to find others....others that may not be a public safety threat but are in the country illegally. — Tom Homan

That is the hinge. State non-cooperation doesn't reduce enforcement; it redirects it. Lock us out of the jails, and we go to the streets. Operation Rotten Apple — 2,197 arrests across New York in 33 days, executed without local assistance — is what that looks like in practice ^[14]. The two prongs have even landed on the same jurisdiction at once. In Minnesota, the DOJ lawsuit and USCIS's Operation Twin Shield enforcement surge hit Minneapolis-St. Paul simultaneously ^[5]. No official has said the timing was coordinated, but the pattern is hard to miss. The court losses are real. Judges blocked the Guard deployments in Chicago and Portland, forcing a withdrawal ^[15]. The defunding of sanctuary cities has been blocked as well. But the losses are secondary, because the bypass track operates without the legal track. The lawsuits produce the political record of state non-compliance; the enforcement machine acts on it — and it runs whether the lawsuits win or not.