Judge slams feds for tying transit funds to ICE compliance

(CN) — A federal judge on Tuesday struck down the Trump administration’s bid to make Department of Transportation funding conditional on states’ compliance with federal immigration authorities, finding the attempt “blatantly” unconstitutional.

U.S. District Judge John McConnell, a Barack Obama appointee in Rhode Island federal court, ruled in favor of 20 Democratic states who sued the administration in June after the department informed them of the attempted rule change.

“Defendants have blatantly overstepped their statutory authority, violated the [Administrative Procedure Act] and transgressed well-settled constitutional limitations on federal funding conditions,” McConnell wrote in a 32-page ruling. “The Constitution demands the court set aside this lawless behavior.”

McConnell granted the states’ motion for summary judgment, giving them the final win in their lawsuit against the Transportation Department and its secretary Sean Duffy. The states scrutinized a letter from Duffy in April, which called on them to “comply fully” with federal laws, including “enforcing controls on illegal immigration,” or risk losing funding for critical transportation infrastructure.

The states argued the Transportation Department overstepped its authority as an executive agency by meddling in the distribution of funds already approved by Congress. Meanwhile, the department claimed it has the power to impose whatever conditions it wants on grant funding as long as it “reasonably determines” those conditions further its core mission.

“This cannot be so,” the judge ruled. “None of the statutes cited by DOT expressly afford it the kind of sweeping authority it claims.”

McConnell noted that he did not, “and indeed cannot,” make any determination on the merits of the federal government’s ongoing mass deportation campaign. But his ruling deems its effort to tie federal transportation funds to that campaign unlawful.

“Defendants are permanently enjoined from implementing or enforcing the [Immigration Enforcement Condition] against the states, or otherwise attempting to condition federal transportation funding on state cooperation with federal civil immigration enforcement,” the judge wrote.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who led the multi-state coalition, took a victory lap on Thursday.

“If President Trump wants to stop losing in court, he should stop breaking the law,” Bonta said in a statement. “The courts have repeatedly and firmly rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to infringe on states’ constitutional right to set their own policy priorities.”

A Department of Transportation spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

McConnell previously issued a preliminary injunction that temporarily blocked the department’s new guideline, ruling in June that “Congress did not authorize or grant authority to the secretary of transportation to impose immigration enforcement conditions on federal dollars specifically appropriated for transportation purposes.”

The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to withhold federal funding from states — or change how it’s distributed — in moves that have been repeatedly blocked and criticized by judges across the country.

ICE cooperation has been a common thread behind several of these funding rule changes. In a comparable attempt to the Department of Transportation’s, the Federal Emergency Management Agency tried making its disaster relief funding similarly conditional on states’ ICE cooperation earlier this year.

That was the subject of an additional lawsuit, brought in May by another coalition of Democratic states.

“By hanging a halt in this critical funding over states like a sword of Damocles, defendants impose immense harm on states, forcing them to choose between readiness for disasters and emergencies, on one hand, and exercising their judgment about how to best use scarce resources to investigate and prosecute crimes on the other,” the states said in the complaint.

That too was quickly struck down by a federal court. Still, the administration tried forging ahead anyway by implementing various workarounds, which were also deemed unlawful.

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