A federal judge on Tuesday denied the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawai‘i’s request to stop the city from using its sidewalk enforcement laws to remove the homeless from Honolulu streets.

“I do not have sufficient information here to issue a temporary restraining order,” U.S. District Judge Helen Gillmor said in explaining her decision.

Gillmor noted that the city and ACLU couldn’t even agree on the differences between personal property and trash. Arguments on the ACLU’s request for a preliminary injunction are now scheduled for early December.

The ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging city laws last week, just as the city was beginning a new series of block-by-block sweeps using the stored property and sidewalk nuisance ordinances as its key enforcement tools to roust the homeless from Kakaako.

A homeless encampment around the University of Hawaii medical school and Hawaii Children’s Discovery Center in Kakaako grew to about 300 people over several months this year as the city enforced the so-called sit-lie ban in areas like Waikiki and Chinatown. Conditions in the encampment had become a safety hazard, with escalating violence among those packed together in wood-reinforced tents and tarps. An assault of state Rep. Tom Brower drew widespread attention and led to state and city collaboration to address the problem.

The Governor’s Leadership Team on Homelessness has been working to find temporary or permanent housing for the homeless living in Kakaako.

ACLU attorney Daniel Gluck argued Tuesday that the crux of the challenge wasn’t the merits or validity of the laws, but that the city acted improperly, and unconstitutionally, by seizing and then immediately destroying property belonging to the homeless.

Ernest Nomura, a city attorney, disputed Gluck’s claim, noting that the sidewalk nuisance ordinance allows the city to take away property without 24-hour advance notice. The stored property ordinance does require that notice.

The city posted warning notices about the sweeps around Kakaako, even though it is not required to do so under the ordinance. Nomura further argued that “the city does not destroy personal property. It removes and discards what is obviously trash.”

But Gluck said the city has had a history of seizing and destroying key items — from identification cards to tents — without prior notification. As to what is considered trash, Gluck said that a ripped tarp may be of no use to most in society but “many people in Kakaako may need it for shelter.”

After Gillmor’s decision, city Corporation Counsel Donna Leong said in a statement that the two ordinances have survived previous challenges and would do the same against the ACLU lawsuit. “In the meantime, the city will continue to enforce the stored property and sidewalk nuisance ordinances in accordance with their provisions,” Leong said.

Late Tuesday, Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s office issued a release stating that the enforcement actions will continue “in a phased approach on the remaining blocks of Kakaako Makai in subsequent weeks. Notices have been posted and handed out throughout Kakaako Makai in Chuukese, English, Marshallese and Samoan.”

Caldwell, in a statement, commended the Department of Facility Maintenance’s enforcement crew “for the hard work they do every day to keep our sidewalks and public spaces open and clean for everyone to use, removing everything from rotting food to toilet buckets to hypodermic needles.”

Besides Kakaako, enforcement of the sidewalk ordinances has taken place in Aiea, Waikiki, Ala Moana Park, Mother Waldron Park, Aala Park and Chinatown, and at Kapalama Canal, the city said.

Gluck, speaking to reporters after Gillmor’s decision, said it’s untenable for the city to be rousting the homeless when they have nowhere else to go.

“The troubling thing is that they are forcing people to leave without providing alternatives on where people can go,” he said. “It speaks volumes when you do have all these people — hundreds of people if not thousands of people — who are sleeping on the street on a daily basis. This is not by choice, this is by extreme poverty.”