Trump administration flouted court order on FEMA grant funding, US judge rules

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By Nate Raymond

(Reuters) -A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that the Trump administration had violated his previous court order by implementing a nearly identical policy that again made state cooperation with federal immigration enforcement a condition for receiving grant funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

U.S. District Judge William Smith in Providence, Rhode Island, wrote that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had done precisely what his Sept. 24 ruling forbade when it imposed new immigration-related conditions that states must accept before they can obtain emergency preparedness grants from FEMA.

The judge in his earlier ruling had struck down conditions the department originally imposed on grant awards that 20 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia argued were designed to coerce them into adhering to the Republican president’s hardline immigration crackdown.

After Smith ruled, the administration issued new grant award documents to the states with nearly identical immigration-enforcement conditions, but with a clause saying they would only become effective if Smith’s ruling was stayed or overturned.

Smith said the “fig leaf conditional nature of the requirement makes little difference,” as the administration was again unlawfully forcing the states to agree to assist in federal immigration enforcement or else forgo millions of dollars in funding.

“Defendants’ new condition is not a good faith effort to comply with the order; it is a ham-handed attempt to bully the states into making promises they have no obligation to make at the risk of losing critical disaster and other funding already appropriated by Congress. 

The judge, an appointee of former Republican President George W. Bush, blocked the new conditions from being enforced and required the administration by next week to amend the grant award documents to remove them.

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The administration had argued it had complied with Smith’s earlier decision and had merely been seeking to preserve its ability to enforce the immigration-related conditions once again in the event his ruling was later overturned.

The case is one of a number of lawsuits that Democratic state attorneys general have filed in Rhode Island and other states in New England, which have become top destinations for litigants seeking rulings blocking Trump’s agenda.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Deepa Babington)