Twenty-five Democratic attorneys general are suing the Trump administration for attaching political conditions to hundreds of millions in federal disaster funding, marking the latest legal clash over what they call coercive use of emergency grants.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court in Rhode Island and led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, names the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Emergency Management Agency as defendants. At stake is more than $740 million in combined grants for disaster preparedness and counter-terrorism work.
According to the complaint, the administration has imposed requirements on the funding that go well beyond traditional disaster preparedness criteria. States seeking the grants must implement a federal voter citizenship verification system and conduct post-election audits. The administration has also threatened to withhold funds from states that decline to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and deportations.
Fema has added another condition allowing the agency to cancel state grants if they fall out of alignment with agency priorities, a move the lawsuit characterizes as giving unprecedented discretionary power to withhold emergency resources.
Bonta framed the conditions as a form of extortion. "President Trump has little support for both his mass deportation agenda and his baseless claims of election fraud, so instead, he's trying to bully state and local governments into adopting his preferred policies in exchange for much-needed funding," he said in a statement.
This is not the first round of litigation on this issue. Democratic attorneys general have already won two previous lawsuits challenging these same grant programs. In ruling against the administration in the most recent case, a Trump-appointed federal judge wrote that holding emergency funding hostage to political demands is "unconscionable and, at least here, unlawful."
The apparent disregard for those court losses spurred this week's challenge. Bonta said the administration showed it remained "undeterred" by earlier defeats and vowed the states would prevail again. "The administration has already lost similar fights in court, and we expect this latest unlawful attempt to fail as well," he said.
A Fema spokesperson rejected the lawsuit, calling it "partisan pushback" against policies designed to strengthen national security. "Election security is national security, and protecting our critical infrastructure remains a top priority for the Trump Administration," the agency said in a statement. "These new requirements will preserve election integrity."
Author James Rodriguez: "The administration's willingness to keep litigating the same issue after two court losses suggests either remarkable confidence or an appetite for prolonged legal battles that most executives would avoid."
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