Judge Rejects Trump Admin Challenge To New York’s ‘Green Light Law’

“The Court’s role is not to evaluate the desirability of the Green Light Law as a policy matter, but rather to assess whether Plaintiff’s well-pled allegations, accepted as true, establish that the challenged provisions of the Green Light Law violate the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause,” she wrote.

“The Court concludes that Plaintiff has failed to state such a claim,” she added

When she filed the lawsuit, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said that Hochul and James were putting “illegal aliens over American citizens.” This is because the disputed state law prevents federal officers from enforcing immigration laws from seeing illegal immigrants’ criminal driving records during traffic stops.

The DOJ’s lawsuit called the law “a frontal assault on the federal immigration laws, and the federal authorities that administer them.” They based this claim on the fact that the law requires the DMV commissioner to tell people who are in the country illegally when a federal immigration agency asks for their information.

The lawsuit also said that the Trump administration’s immigration plans might be easier to carry out if federal officials could see 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 agent was killed during a shootout after a traffic stop with a German national in Vermont near the northern US-Canada border in January, there was a renewed call for criticism of the law. Continue reading…