The Federal Emergency Management Agency building in Washington, D.C., is pictured in November 2024. (Photo by Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom)
States don’t have to help enforce the Trump administration’s immigration policies in order to get disaster aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a federal judge in Rhode Island ruled Wednesday.
Senior U.S. District Judge William E. Smith of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island granted a motion for a permanent injunction against the Department of Homeland Security, calling a federal directive issued in April “coercive, ambiguous, unrelated to the purpose of the federal grants, and undermine[s] the system of federalism.”
The directive made enforcing the administration’s immigration detention policies a condition for receiving federal disaster relief aid.
“States rely on these grants for billions of dollars annually in disaster relief,” wrote Smith, a George W. Bush appointee. “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.”
A group of Democratic attorneys general from 20 states filed suit against the Department of Homeland Security in May, claiming the agency lacked the legal authority to require states to abide by immigration policy in order to receive funding. The District of Columbia later joined the suit.
They argued in their initial lawsuit that not only was the policy unconstitutional, but violated the Administrative Procedure Act. Like all Democratic lawsuits, the attorneys general called the decision “arbitrary and capricious.”
The Department of Homeland Security disagreed, arguing that conditions align with its core mission of enforcing federal immigration law.
But that was not enough of a justification for Smith.
“Such platitudes cannot substitute for an actual explanation of why it is necessary to attach sweeping immigration conditions to all the grants at issue here,” he wrote.
Smith’s ruling was welcomed by Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, who said tying aid to immigration policy exceeded the Department of Homeland Security’s authority and threatened to deny states the aid the needed and were due to receive under the law.
“This ruling not only preserves tens of millions of dollars in federal funding that helps Marylanders and their communities recover from devastating natural disasters – it also stops Maryland from having to break its own laws to acquire these essential resources,” Brown said in a prepared statement.
“Maryland fully complies with federal immigration law, but the Trump administration’s coercive conditions exceeded federal requirements and would have forced Maryland to violate its own laws that regulate state and local cooperation with immigration authorities,” he said.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha called Smith’s ruling a “win for the rule of law” and reaffirmed that President Donald Trump cannot pick and choose what federal laws to follow.
“Today’s 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,” Neronha said in a statement. “Case closed.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Besides Maryland, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia, other states that were part of the lawsuit were California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin and Vermont.
– Maryland Matters contributed in Annapolis to this article, which first appeared in the Rhode Island Current, a part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Rhode Island Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janine L. Weisman for questions: info@rhodeislandcurrent.com.
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