By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) -A federal judge ruled on Wednesday that an effort by the Trump administration to force states to cooperate with immigration enforcement in order to receive billions of dollars in emergency and disaster aid is unlawful and unconstitutional.
U.S. District Judge William Smith in Providence, Rhode Island, sided with 20 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia, which challenged conditions the U.S. Department of Homeland Security placed on their ability to obtain grant funding.
Those states sued in May, arguing the department was unlawfully using federal funding intended for emergency preparedness and disaster relief to coerce them into adhering to the Republican president’s hardline immigration agenda.
The department, which oversees U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had argued that such conditions were justified because it was tasked with enforcing federal immigration law.
But Smith said the department’s policy was arbitrary and violated the U.S. Constitution, as it imposed sweeping immigration conditions on all grants, regardless of their statutory purpose.
“Denying such funding if states refuse to comply with vague immigration requirements leaves them with no meaningful choice, particularly where state budgets are already committed,” he wrote.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, hailed the ruling in a social media post, saying it would ensure “the department can’t hold life-saving disaster relief funds hostage to advance its anti-immigration efforts.”
The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The decision marked the latest victory for states contesting administration efforts to impose immigration-related conditions on grant funding. Another judge in Rhode Island in June blocked a similar move by the U.S. Department of Transportation.
The Department of Homeland Security’s conditions applied to all grants it administered. After the lawsuit was filed, the administration said it had decided to apply them only to a subset of the grant programs.
But Smith, an appointee of Republican President George W. Bush, said DHS never formally rescinded the policy, meaning states would remain bound by conditions attached to every grant, including those it advised should be untouched.
He said that as a result states “face a dilemma: either certify compliance with contested federal immigration policies or risk losing critical emergency and disaster-relief funding.”
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Mark Porter and Lisa Shumaker)
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