Lukas Flippo

Mayor Justin Elicker kicked off the weekend with an announcement that New Haven would be filing to sue the Trump administration. 

In the wake of a flurry of executive orders targeting cities that refuse to assist federal immigration authorities, New Haven joined San Francisco, Portland and King County, Washington, in a lawsuit against the administration for allegedly targeting sanctuary jurisdictions. The suit was filed Friday evening in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. 

“What this executive order does is that it makes our cities less safe. It attempts to divert resources away from fighting crime towards hunting down good community members that are productive and happen to be immigrants,” Elicker said at a press conference Friday. “President Trump is defunding the police. At this moment in time with unprecedented attacks on our democracy, … when we see injustice, we stand up to it.”

In his first year as mayor, Elicker signed a “welcoming city” order, which prohibits all city employees from asking about or investigating immigration status unless required by state or federal law. Elicker has recently been reminding city employees about this policy, he said, as President Donald Trump continues to announce policies targeting immigrants. 

Alongside the other mayors whose cities are involved in the lawsuit, Elicker alleges Trump has been targeting welcoming cities like New Haven “to compel local jurisdictions into carrying out the President’s policy priorities and to commandeer local law enforcement officers to take on the role of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.”

The lawsuit argues that Trump’s recent executive order titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” and related Department of Justice memos violate the 10th Amendment, separation of powers, the spending clause and the Administrative Procedures Act, which is a threat to safety and wellbeing of the plaintiff jurisdictions’ residents. The memos made it clear, Elicker explained, that jurisdictions that fail to comply with these orders will lose their federal funding — funds that support violence prevention and increased safety.

San Francisco has had success suing the Trump administration in the past. In 2017, Trump issued a similar executive order barring sanctuary cities from receiving federal grants. After San Francisco filed a suit, a federal judge issued a permanent injunction to block the order. Eight years later, Elicker is hoping this lawsuit triggers a similar response. 

Tabitha Sookdeo ENV ’26, executive director of undocumented youth advocacy organization Connecticut Students for a Dream, praised the city for joining the lawsuit.

Sookdeo noted that New Haven did not participate in the 2017 San Francisco lawsuit. She said that the rapid pace of the second Trump administration’s immigration policy likely spurred New Haven officials to action.

“The things that the Trump administration has been able to accomplish within the past two to three weeks has been more significant than all four years of his prior administration,” she said. “It’s significantly more sinister and problematic and jarring.”

Although New Haven’s involvement in the lawsuit marks a shift in the city’s approach when compared to the first Trump administration, Sookdeo doubts that this will make the city a specific target of the federal government. She noted that all Connecticut municipalities are affected by the Trust Act, a 2013 law that limits state and local police’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

Maureen Abell, an immigration lawyer at the New Haven Legal Assistance Association, questioned the feasibility of the recent Trump executive order in light of previous court decisions regarding the balance of federal and state power. 

She also underscored the distinction between interfering with the work of federal immigration authorities, which is illegal, and simply not assisting them, which is what New Haven and many other sanctuary cities opt to do.

“This conflation of not doing the federal government’s job for them and actively hindering the federal government doing their own job… in order to sway public opinion around things like withholding funds [is] really dangerous,” Abell said. “It’s part of an extremely worrying trend that limits the state’s authority to run its own business.”

New Haven became a “welcoming city” in 2020.