BOSTON (AP) \u2014 A federal judge in Rhode Island ruled on Wednesday that it\u2019s unconstitutional to require states to cooperate on immigration enforcement actions to get funding for disasters, which is overseen by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.<\/p>\n
A coalition of 20 state Democratic attorneys general in May filed a federal lawsuit claiming that the Trump administration is threatening to withhold billions of dollars of disaster-relief funds unless states agree to certain immigration enforcement actions. <\/p>\n
In a ruling granting a summary judgment to the plaintiffs and denying one for the federal government, U.S. District Judge William Smith found that the \u201ccontested conditions are arbitrary and capricious\u201d and that the actions are unconstitutional because they are \u201ccoercive, ambiguous, unrelated to the purpose of the federal grants.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPlaintiff States stand to suffer irreparable harm; the effect of the loss of emergency and disaster funds cannot be recovered later, and the downstream effect on disaster response and public safety are real and not compensable,\u201d Smith wrote.<\/p>\n
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said the ruling was a \u201cwin for the rule of law and reaffirms that the President may not pick and choose which laws he and his Administration obey.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cToday\u2019s permanent injunction by Judge Smith says, in no uncertain terms, that this Administration may not illegally impose immigration conditions on congressionally allocated federal funding for emergency services like disaster relief and flood mitigation. Case closed,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
In their complaint, states argued that for decades they counted on federal funding to prepare for, respond to and recover from disasters. But they argued conditions put forward by the Trump administration requiring them to commit state resources to immigration enforcement put at risk funding for everything from mitigating earthquake and flood risks to managing active wildfires.<\/p>\n
The Department of Homeland Security \u201cseek to upend this emergency management system, holding critical emergency preparedness and response funding hostage unless States promise to devote their scarce criminal enforcement resources, and other state agency resources, to the federal government\u2019s own task of civil immigration enforcement beyond what state law allows,\u201d the plaintiffs wrote.<\/p>\n
They argued successfully that this not only was unconstitutional but that it violated the Administrative Procedure Act, a law that governs the process by which federal agencies develop and issue regulations. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe conditions are arbitrary and capricious under the APA because DHS failed to provide a reasoned explanation, failed to consider the reliance interests of the states, and departed from longstanding funding practices without adequate justification,\u201d Smith wrote.<\/p>\n
The government had argued that the challenge was moot since it had already decided to exclude 12 of the 18 programs from having to comply with the immigration requirements. For the remaining programs, the government argued that this was a contract dispute that should be resolved in the Court of Federal Claims.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven if that were not so, Congress intended for the FEMA grant programs at issue to address national security and terrorism concerns that rely on the cooperation that the conditions promote,\u201d the government wrote in court documents. \u201cCongress did not preclude the placement of the challenged conditions on the grant programs at issue, and Plaintiffs have not established a likelihood of success on the merits with respect to these programs.\u201d <\/p>\n
A spokeswoman for DHS, Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement Wednesday that the administration believes that \u201ccities and states who break the law and prevent us from arresting criminal illegal aliens should not receive federal funding.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Trump Administration is committed to restoring the rule of law. No lawsuit, not this one or any other, is going to stop us from doing that,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
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