The U.S. Department of Justice filed a 53-page federal complaint on April 9, 2026 against Washtenaw County, targeting three coordinated policies it calls a “nefarious roadmap” to avoid federal immigration enforcement. The lawsuit, assigned to U.S. District Judge Robert White in the Eastern District of Michigan, challenges Prosecutor Eli Savit’s directive to avoid immigration consequences in plea deals, Sheriff Alyshia Dyer’s refusal to honor ICE detainers without a judicial warrant, and the Board of Commissioners’ January 2026 resolution barring ICE from county-owned property. At its core, this is a Supremacy Clause case with implications that reach far beyond Washtenaw County.
The case number alone tells you something about where this is headed: Civil Action No. 5:26-cv-11166, filed April 9, 2026, United States District Court, Eastern District of Michigan. This is not a press release dressed as litigation. It is a 53-page complaint naming six defendants, requesting permanent injunctions against three distinct policies, and asserting that a Michigan county has built a system designed to defeat federal law.
That framing is the DOJ’s. The county disputes it. Both positions deserve serious examination. Neither one is complete on its own, and neither one touches the structural problem this case actually exposes.
The Three Policies at Issue
The complaint does not target a single act. It targets a framework. Understanding what the DOJ is actually challenging requires looking at each policy on its own before examining how they function together.
Savit issued a directive on February 24, 2021 instructing assistant prosecuting attorneys to seek to avoid immigration consequences wherever possible when handling cases involving noncitizen defendants. According to the complaint, the directive tells prosecutors to offer lenient plea deals, reduce charges, use specific court document language to avoid triggering immigration consequences, and consider dismissal in cases where charging would bring the defendant to ICE’s attention. The DOJ calls this a “nefarious roadmap” demanding that local prosecutors shirk federal reporting obligations. Savit is currently seeking the Democratic nomination for Michigan Attorney General.
Sheriff’s Office General Order 1.14 instructs staff not to honor ICE detainer requests unless a judicial warrant accompanies the detainer. The county’s position is that honoring administrative detainers without judicial authorization raises Fourth Amendment concerns. The DOJ’s position is that this constitutes active obstruction of federal immigration enforcement operations.
On January 21, 2026, the board passed a resolution declaring county-owned property off-limits to ICE agents without a valid judicial warrant or court order. The resolution also opposes the use of masks or face coverings by ICE agents operating in the area. The DOJ challenges this resolution as an unlawful restriction on federal law enforcement access and asserts it constitutes discrimination against a federal agency.
The complaint argues these three policies, taken together, constitute a coordinated sanctuary framework that violates 8 U.S.C. sections 1373 and 1644 (which bar local governments from restricting information sharing with federal immigration authorities) and the Supremacy Clause of Article VI. The federal government is asking Judge White to declare all three invalid and to enjoin their enforcement permanently.
The Anchor Case: Mario Araujo-Rodriguez
Federal complaints need a concrete example to anchor an abstract legal theory. Here, the DOJ provides one. Mario Araujo-Rodriguez, an individual the complaint describes as unlawfully present in the United States, was charged in Washtenaw County Circuit Court with three counts of criminal sexual conduct in the second degree involving a child under the age of 13. He was sentenced in January 2026 to a jail term short enough to keep him out of state prison. ICE obtained a federal arrest warrant under 8 U.S.C. section 1326. As of the complaint’s filing, county jail staff had indicated they would be unable to comply with the detainer upon his scheduled release.
The county’s own immigration policy acknowledged, in the complaint’s recounting, that serious crimes like murder would render a noncitizen deportable, but that it would be inappropriate for a prosecutor to charge a murder as a non-murder simply to avoid immigration consequences. The DOJ’s complaint reads that acknowledgment as evidence of deliberate design, not as a limitation on the policy’s scope.
The Rodriguez case is the DOJ’s illustration of what it claims the system produces. It is not the only factual predicate in the complaint, but it is the one the federal press release leads with, and it is the one most likely to define public understanding of what this litigation is about.
The Constitutional Fight
The legal question at the center of this case is not new, but the posture is. Under the Supremacy Clause of Article VI, federal law preempts conflicting state or local measures, rendering them unenforceable. The Supreme Court has consistently held that when a state or locality attempts to regulate immigration, directly or indirectly, federal law will typically prevail. The harder question is whether declining to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement is the same as attempting to regulate it.
Courts have drawn a distinction that matters here. The federal government cannot commandeer state or local officers to enforce federal law. That limit comes from the anti-commandeering doctrine, grounded in New York v. United States and Printz v. United States. Local governments are not required to assist in federal enforcement operations. But the DOJ’s theory in this case is different: it is not that Washtenaw County failed to assist, it is that Washtenaw County actively designed its systems to produce outcomes that defeat federal law’s objectives.
The distinction the DOJ is pressing is between passive non-cooperation, which courts have generally permitted, and active system design intended to neutralize federal law’s operation, which presents a stronger preemption argument. Whether Savit’s directive crosses that line is the question Judge White will have to answer.
The county’s counterposition, as stated through Corporation Counsel Billard, is that its policies represent constitutional exercises of local discretion, including Fourth Amendment-grounded concerns about honoring administrative detainers without judicial authorization. That argument has support in prior litigation. Federal courts have found in other contexts that administrative ICE detainers do not carry the legal authority of a judicial warrant, and that holding individuals on detainers without judicial sign-off can constitute unlawful detention.
Neither side is operating in legal vacuum here. The precedent landscape is genuinely contested, and that is exactly why this case will matter when it gets resolved.
The Part the Coverage Is Missing
Most of the reporting on this lawsuit treats it as a political story. Savit is running for attorney general. The Trump administration is targeting sanctuary jurisdictions. Both of those things are true and relevant. Neither of them is the structural problem.
The structural problem is this: when prosecutors are instructed to modify charges to avoid federal triggers, the data that flows from county systems into federal databases becomes unreliable. Charge distributions stop reflecting underlying conduct. Risk assessments, recidivism tracking, and resource allocation models downstream all operate on the assumption that what the charging document says bears some relationship to what the defendant actually did. When that relationship is systematically altered by policy, the data is contaminated, and no one labels it as such.
The data problem is not theoretical. If prosecutors modify charges to avoid federal notification triggers, federal systems receive incomplete or inaccurate information about who is in local custody and why. ICE detainers cannot function as designed when the charge that would trigger a notification has been converted to something that does not. The accountability mechanism has a hole in it, and nobody owns the hole.
Layer in the sheriff’s detainer policy and the access restriction, and what emerges is a three-point system in which the prosecutor controls what charges flow into the record, the sheriff controls whether federal agencies can access the person connected to that record, and the board controls whether federal agents can physically enter the buildings where that person is held. Each policy has its own stated rationale. Together, they operate as a coordinated barrier.
The DOJ’s framing as a coordinated system is, from an institutional forensics standpoint, accurate. Whether that coordination is unlawful is the legal question. Whether it is wise institutional design is a separate question that nobody is asking publicly.
The AG Race Factor
Eli Savit is not just a county prosecutor. He is actively seeking the Democratic nomination for Michigan Attorney General. That means the federal government has filed a lawsuit naming a statewide candidate personally as a defendant during an active campaign, and the candidate has said he likely cannot comment publicly because of the pending litigation.
This creates a political dynamic that cuts in multiple directions. For Savit’s supporters, the lawsuit may read as federal targeting of a progressive reformer. For critics, it raises questions about judgment and exposure that are relevant to a candidate seeking the state’s top legal position. Clutch Justice has reported separately on additional litigation involving Savit’s office, including a federal whistleblower complaint filed in September 2025 by Nimish Ganatra, a senior manager in the prosecutor’s office, alleging retaliation for reporting alleged internal misconduct. That case is Ganatra v. Washtenaw County Prosecutor’s Office et al., No. 2:25-cv-13087 (E.D. Mich.).
None of those cases have been adjudicated. All of them are pending. The pattern they collectively suggest is a matter of documented record, not established finding, and Clutch Justice will continue to track each docket as it develops.
What the Counterargument Actually Says
The county’s position deserves engagement, not dismissal. The Fourth Amendment concern about administrative detainers is legally grounded. Courts have found that ICE detainers are requests, not commands, and that holding someone beyond their release date on the basis of an administrative request alone, without judicial authorization, can constitute an unlawful seizure. State Sen. Jeff Irwin, a Democrat, characterized the suit publicly as a waste of taxpayer resources, noting that the taxpayers pay for all the lawyers on both sides and questioning whether there are more efficient ways for the federal government to deploy enforcement resources.
The prosecutorial discretion argument is also real. Prosecutors make charging decisions based on a range of factors every day. The question is not whether discretion exists but whether a formal directive systematically applying that discretion to produce a specific federal outcome crosses from discretion into preemption avoidance. That is not a question with an obvious answer, and courts have not uniformly resolved it.
What the county has not fully addressed is the systems problem described above. Saying the policies are constitutional does not resolve the question of what those policies do to the reliability of the institutional record. That is the gap this case leaves open regardless of how the legal question is resolved.
What Comes Next
The case is before Judge Robert White in the Eastern District of Michigan. The DOJ is seeking permanent injunctions. The county has disputed the claims but had not yet formally responded to the complaint as of its filing date. Washtenaw County Corporation Counsel will likely move to dismiss or file an answer in the coming weeks. A ruling on any preliminary injunction motion would come before that.
This case will not resolve quickly. Supremacy Clause challenges involving prosecutorial discretion are complex, the factual record is contested, and any trial court decision is likely to be appealed by whoever loses. What this case will do, regardless of outcome, is force a clearer answer to a question that most local governments and federal agencies have preferred to leave ambiguous: at what point does a policy designed to minimize federal consequences cross from local governance into preemption?
The feds call it a nefarious roadmap. The county calls it a welcoming community. The question the court will have to answer is whether those two descriptions are mutually exclusive, or whether both can be true while the system in the middle quietly breaks.
