A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily halted a Trump administration plan to reduce disaster relief and anti-terrorism funding for states with so-called sanctuary policies for undocumented immigrants.
U.S. District Judge Mary S. McElroy granted the temporary restraining order curtailing the cuts at the request of California, 10 other states and the District of Columbia, which argued in a lawsuit Monday that the policy appeared to have illegally cost them hundreds of millions of dollars.
The states said they were first notified of the cuts over the weekend. McElroy made her decision during an emergency hearing on the states’ motion in Rhode Island District Court on Tuesday afternoon.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta cheered the decision as the state’s latest win in pushing back against what he described as a series of unlawful, funding-related power grabs by the Trump administration.
“Over and over, the courts have stopped the Trump Administration’s illegal efforts to tie unrelated grant funding to state policies,” Bonta said. “It’s a little thing called state sovereignty, but given the President’s propensity to violate the Constitution, it’s unsurprising that he’s unfamiliar with it.”
Neither the White House nor the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the funding and notified the states of the cuts, immediately responded to a request for comment Tuesday.
Sanctuary policies are not uniform and the term is imprecise, but it generally refers to policies that bar states and localities — and their local law enforcement agencies — from participating in federal immigration raids or other enforcement initiatives.
The Trump administration and other Republicans have cast such policies as undermining law and order. Democrats and progressives including in California say instead that states and cities have finite public safety resources and that engaging in immigration enforcement serves only to undermine the trust they and their law enforcement agencies need to maintain with the public in order to prevent and solve crime, including in large immigrant communities.
In their lawsuit Monday, the states said the funding being reduced was part of billions in federal dollars annually distributed to the states to “prepare for, protect against, respond to, and recover from catastrophic disasters,” and which administrations of both political parties distributed “evenhandedly” for decades before Trump.
Authorized by Congress after events such as Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina, the funding covers the salaries of first responders, testing of state computer networks for cyberattack vulnerabilities, mutual aid compacts between regional partners and emergency responses after disasters, the states said.
Bonta’s office said California was informed over the weekend by Homeland Security officials that it would be receiving $110 million instead of $165 million, a reduction of its budget by about a third. The states’ lawsuit said other blue states saw even more dramatic cuts, with Illinois seeing a 69% reduction and New York receiving a 79% reduction, while red states saw substantial funding increases.
Bonta on Tuesday said the administration’s reshuffling of funds based on state compliance with the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement priorities was illegal and needed to be halted — and restored to previous levels based on risk assessment — in order to keep everyone in the country safe.
“California uses the grant funding at stake in our lawsuit to protect the safety of our communities from acts of terrorism and other disasters — meaning the stakes are quite literally life and death,” he said. “This is not something to play politics with. I’m grateful to the court for seeing the urgency of this dangerous diversion of homeland security funding.”
Homeland Security officials have previously argued that the agency should be able to withhold funding from states that it believes are not upholding or are actively undermining its core mission of defending the nation from threats, including the threat it sees from illegal immigration.
Other judges have also ruled against the administration conditioning disaster and public safety funding on states and localities complying with federal immigration policies.
Joining California in Monday’s lawsuit were Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington, as well as the District of Columbia.
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