Judge slams Trump administration for defying court order on FEMA grants

A federal judge in Rhode Island has ruled that President Donald Trump’s administration once again broke the law, this time by trying to reintroduce immigration-related conditions on state disaster grants that he had already struck down last month.

In a sharply worded decision on Tuesday, District Judge William Smith said the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “did precisely what the court forbade” by conditioning access to Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funds on state cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

The administration’s new grant terms, issued after Smith’s initial September 24 ruling, were nearly identical to those the judge had already rejected. The only difference was a clause saying the restrictions would apply if his earlier decision was stayed or overturned. Smith wasn’t impressed.

“The fig leaf conditional nature of the requirement makes little difference,” he wrote. “This 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.”

Smith, who was appointed by former Republican President George W. Bush, blocked the administration from enforcing the conditions and ordered DHS to revise the grant documents by next week.

The ruling marks the latest chapter in a long-running legal battle over the Trump administration’s push to tie federal funding to immigration policy. In this case, the contested grants are part of FEMA’s emergency preparedness program, which provides millions of dollars annually to help states respond to natural disasters and crises.

Twenty Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia initially sued, arguing that the new rules were an unconstitutional attempt to coerce them into participating in the federal government’s immigration crackdown.

DHS has maintained that it is simply seeking to “preserve its ability” to enforce immigration-related conditions in the future, should higher courts rule in its favor. But Smith’s decision makes clear he saw the administration’s latest maneuver as an act of defiance.

“The defendants can’t just wait for an appeal while ignoring a lawful court order,” one constitutional scholar at Harvard Law School told reporters. “That’s not how separation of powers works.”

The Department of Homeland Security has not yet commented on the ruling.