A federal judge has turned down the Trump administration’s request to stop New York’s so-called Green Light Law, which allows the state to give people driver’s licenses even if they can’t prove that they are in the country legally.
U.S. District Judge Anne Nardacci in Albany said that the Trump administration did not back up its claims that some parts of the state law are not valid because they are illegal, control the federal government, or treat the federal government differently.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) sued the state law in February, saying it is unconstitutional because it goes against the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, which says that federal laws are more important than state laws. They also asked the court to stop the law from being enforced.
The lawsuit named the state of New York, as well as Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul and Democratic Attorney General Letitia James as defendants.
The DOJ challenged three specific parts of the law in the lawsuit. Without a court order or warrant, the DMV couldn’t share a person’s records or information with “any agency that primarily enforces immigration law or to any employee or agent of such agency.”
Another rule said that people who can see DMV records have to promise not to tell anyone else what they see. The part of the law that is being fought over said that the DMV had to tell someone within three days of getting a request for information or records from federal immigration authorities.
Nardacci said that the lawsuit is about immigration enforcement, which is a very important political issue. She said in the ruling, though, that her job is not to judge the policy but to see if the plaintiffs proved that it breaks the Supremacy Clause.
She wrote, “The Court’s job is not to judge the desirability of the Green Light Law as a policy matter, but to see if Plaintiff’s well-pleaded claims, taken as true, show that the parts of the Green Light Law that are being challenged go against the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.”
She went on to say, “The Court finds that the Plaintiff has not made such a claim.”
Pam Bondi, the U.S. Attorney General, said that Hochul and James were putting “illegal aliens over American citizens” when she filed the lawsuit. This is because the state law in question stops federal officers from checking the criminal driving records of illegal immigrants during traffic stops.
The DOJ said in its lawsuit that the law was “a frontal assault on the federal immigration laws and the federal authorities that enforce them.” They said this because the law says that the DMV commissioner has to tell people who are in the country illegally when a federal immigration agency asks for their information.
The lawsuit also said that it might be easier for the Trump administration to carry out its immigration plans if federal officials could access New York’s driver information at any time.
The Green Light Law went into effect in 2019, but after a US Customs and Border Protection officer was killed in a shootout with a German citizen during a traffic stop in Vermont near the northern US-Canada border in January, there was a renewed call for criticism of the law.
Hector Garza, vice president of the National Border Patrol Council, told Fox News at the time that “this Green Light Law has pretty much taken away any information that can help law enforcement stay safe as they do their jobs.”
Garza went on to say, “What [the Green Light Law] does is that it stops law enforcement agents from getting any kind of information about any registrations that the state has.” “Before we pull someone over for a traffic stop, for example, law enforcement will usually check the vehicle’s registration to see if there are any warrants out for that person and if they are considered armed and dangerous.”
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