DOJ sues Washtenaw County, Michigan over immigrant-protection policies

On April 9, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a six-count complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan naming Washtenaw County, its Board of Commissioners, the Sheriff's Office and Sheriff Alyshia M. Dyer, and the Prosecuting Attorney's Office and Prosecuting Attorney Eli Savit. The suit targets three local measures: a Sheriff's Office general order declining to honor ICE detainers absent a judicial warrant, a 2021 prosecutor directive to seek to avoid immigration consequences in charging decisions where possible, and a January county resolution barring ICE from county-owned property without a judicial warrant. The Department contends these policies violate the Supremacy Clause and seeks declaratory judgment and injunctive relief.

The Department situates the filing within a coordinated campaign, describing it as among roughly 14 comparable actions brought over the past year against Democratic-led jurisdictions including New York, Minnesota, Los Angeles, Boston, and New Jersey. That framing — federal litigation deployed as a pattern against perceived political opponents, here naming an elected sheriff and prosecutor personally and aiming to dismantle local protections for immigrants — is what brings the filing within weaponizing-doj and targeting-marginalized-communities. The structural parallel is the second 2026 DOJ antisemitism suit against UCLA already in the archive.

The recorded event is the government's completed act of filing, not the truth of its allegations against the county; the merits will be litigated in court. Federal preemption of so-called sanctuary policies remains a contested legal question, and a narrower reading could treat the suit as aggressive-but-ordinary enforcement litigation mapping to weaponizing-doj alone.