DOJ Sues Connecticut Over Sanctuary Policies
The U.S. Justice Department sued Connecticut and New Haven, targeting the Trust Act as an unconstitutional barrier to federal immigration enforcement.
The Justice Department sued Connecticut and New Haven on Monday, taking direct aim at the Trust Act and charging that the state’s sanctuary framework unlawfully blocks federal immigration enforcement.
The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Connecticut, argues the Trust Act “interfere[s] with the federal government’s enforcement of immigration laws” and lets dangerous offenders walk free when Immigration and Customs Enforcement comes to collect them. Connecticut’s Democratic leadership now faces its sharpest federal legal confrontation yet over policies that have been in place, in some form, since 2013.
What the Trust Act does and doesn’t allow
The Trust Act isn’t a blanket refusal to work with ICE. It’s more specific than that. Connecticut officers can honor an ICE detainer only if federal agents produce a judicial warrant, if the subject shows up on a terrorist watch list, or if that person has a conviction or guilty plea on a class A or B felony. Those categories cover murder, kidnapping, sexual assault, robbery, and first-degree manslaughter.
Detainers, for context, are ICE’s way of asking local police to hold someone for up to 48 hours so federal agents can arrange a pickup. You can read more about how they work at the ICE detainer policy page.
Connecticut’s original law dates to 2013. Lawmakers updated it in 2023, expanding the crimes that trigger ICE cooperation. The revised list added sexual assault, strangulation, burglary with a firearm, possession of child sexual abuse material, enticing a minor, and violating a protective order. That same update gave individuals a private right of action to sue over violations. Law enforcement groups pushed back hard on that provision, warning it would expose individual officers to personal liability.
None of it satisfied Washington.
The federal case
The Justice Department’s theory rests on the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution. When federal and state law collide, federal law wins. “The United States has well-established, preeminent, and preemptive authority to regulate immigration matters,” the complaint said. The department’s position isn’t just that Connecticut is sitting on its hands. It’s that the state is actively throwing up barriers to lawful federal operations.
The suit cites the case of Sanjay Sivan Walsh, convicted in 2023 on two counts of second-degree sexual assault and released on probation after serving 21 months. ERO Boston acting Field Office Director Patricia H. Hyde stated that the Connecticut Department of Correction’s adherence to the Trust Act blocked ICE from taking Walsh into custody at the moment of his release. That’s exactly the scenario, the department argues, that the Trust Act was designed to create and that the 2023 revisions didn’t fix.
The Justice Department’s complaint also reaches back to 2007 in its account of the federal statutes it says Connecticut is defying, building a timeline meant to show this isn’t a new or ambiguous area of law.
New Haven’s problem
New Haven is named as a co-defendant because its own local policies, the Justice Department contends, push the problem even further. The city has long been among Connecticut’s most assertive sanctuary jurisdictions. Federal lawyers argue New Haven’s rules layer an additional wall on top of state law, compounding what they call deliberate obstruction of ICE operations.
Hearings in this case will be scheduled through the federal court in Connecticut. You can track the federal court schedule for updates as this litigation moves forward. The CT Mirror first reported the filing.
What’s at stake
Connecticut isn’t alone. Dozens of jurisdictions across the country have similar laws, and federal courts haven’t spoken uniformly on how far a state can go in limiting local cooperation with ICE. What makes this suit notable is its scope: it targets both a state statute and a major city’s independent policies in a single action, filed in 2026 with a Justice Department that has shown it won’t treat state resistance as a political abstraction.
Democratic leaders in Hartford haven’t said whether they’ll fight the suit to trial or seek a negotiated outcome. The Trust Act has survived multiple prior challenges, but none brought with this level of federal resources and political will behind them.
ERO Boston’s Patricia H. Hyde put the federal government’s bottom line plainly: Connecticut’s compliance with its own law cost ICE a convicted sex offender. That’s the argument the department will carry into court.