Federal Judge Permanently Blocks Trump Administration From Tying Police Grants to Immigration Enforcement

A federal judge in Rhode Island has permanently blocked the Trump administration from forcing states to help enforce federal immigration law as the price of receiving public safety grants, handing Democratic-led states their latest courtroom victory in a year-long fight over the conditions attached to federal money.

Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr. of the United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island ruled from the bench on Wednesday, 4 November, in favour of 22 states and the District of Columbia, declaring that the Justice Department had acted unlawfully when it tied grants for police departments, prosecutors and youth justice programmes to cooperation with immigration authorities, according to Reuters.

The ruling permanently bars the federal government from enforcing the immigration conditions against the states that brought the case. It covers some of the most important streams of federal criminal justice funding in the country, including the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant programme, known as Byrne JAG, which the Justice Department itself describes as the leading source of federal justice funding for state and local governments.

New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport, who co-led the coalition, said in a statement that the court had “declared the Trump Administration’s actions unlawful and permanently enjoined any implementation or enforcement of these illegal conditions”.

“Today’s victory in court makes clear that the federal government cannot unlawfully politicise law enforcement and public safety by threatening our access to critical funding that helps us help pay for protective equipment for law enforcement, fight drug trafficking, enforce Megan’s Law, and find violent criminals,” Davenport said, according to the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office. “Make no mistake: We will continue to fight the Administration’s brazenly unlawful actions that put politics over public safety.”

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment, Reuters reported.

What the judge decided

The case, State of New Jersey et al v. United States Department of Justice et al, was filed in the District of Rhode Island under case number 25-cv-00404. Judge McConnell, who was appointed to the bench by Democratic President Barack Obama and has served as the court’s chief judge since December 2019, ruled that the Justice Department had exceeded its authority by attaching immigration-enforcement requirements to grants that Congress created for state and local criminal justice programmes.

The conditions at the heart of the case required grant recipients to give federal immigration officers access to people in state custody suspected of living in the United States illegally, to notify the Department of Homeland Security before releasing such people, and to comply with requirements concerning immigration-related information, according to Reuters.

The states argued that the Justice Department had no authority to impose those terms, and that the conditions also ran afoul of the Spending Clause of the United States Constitution, which gives Congress, not the executive branch, the power over federal spending. The argument, in essence, was that Congress wrote the rules for these grants — including who is eligible and how the money is divided — and the Justice Department could not rewrite them by adding a new immigration test of its own.

Judge McConnell agreed. The ruling permanently prohibits the federal government from enforcing the disputed conditions on the states that sued, according to the Jersey Vindicator, which first reported the decision from New Jersey’s perspective. The injunction applies to the plaintiff states rather than operating as a blanket nationwide ban on all immigration-related grant rules, a distinction that matters for the dozens of states that did not join the lawsuit.

The decision was delivered from the bench, meaning the judge announced it in court rather than issuing a lengthy written opinion at the same moment. The states’ account, published within hours of the ruling, described the outcome in the same terms: the administration’s actions were declared unlawful and their enforcement permanently enjoined.

The money at stake

The sums involved are large, and they reach into the daily work of police departments, prosecutors’ offices and youth programmes across the country.

The dispute began in August 2025, when the Trump administration told states they would be unable to access more than $1.3 billion in Victims of Crime Act funding unless they agreed to its immigration demands, according to the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office. The multistate coalition sued, and the federal government backed down on the crime-victim funds, removing the conditions from that money.

But the Justice Department then applied similar conditions to three other grant programmes, prompting the states to revise their lawsuit to challenge those as well, according to Reuters. The programmes affected are the Byrne JAG formula grants, the Byrne State Crisis Intervention Program and grants administered through the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

In the 2025 fiscal year, the states that sued said they were allocated $80 million through the Byrne JAG programme alone, according to Reuters. New Jersey was allocated about $4.2 million in Byrne grants for fiscal year 2025, according to the Jersey Vindicator, and the state received more than $21 million in Byrne JAG funding between fiscal years 2019 and 2024, according to a statement from the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office cited in local reporting.

The effects are concrete rather than abstract. In Oregon, the grant funding at issue pays for Youth Development Oregon, a division of the state Department of Education, which this year is expected to receive $667,119 for programmes that keep young people out of trouble, improve youth probation and support children in the justice system, according to the Oregon Department of Justice. Attorney General Dan Rayfield said the judge “threw out the immigration requirements and permanently blocked the federal government from using them as a condition for the funding”.

Byrne JAG money pays for a wide range of local criminal justice work: police equipment, gang investigations, drug treatment, prosecution and court programmes, crime prevention, corrections and technology improvements. Because the grants are distributed by a formula set by Congress — based on each state’s share of the national population and its share of reported violent crime over the previous three years — they are, by design, not supposed to depend on a state’s politics or its stance on federal immigration policy.

How the case unfolded

The lawsuit was one of a wave of cases filed by Democratic state attorneys general and advocacy groups challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to force recipients of federal grant funding to align with the president’s priorities, according to Reuters. The administration has used the same technique across the government: attaching immigration-cooperation conditions to money Congress appropriated for other purposes, from transport grants to disaster relief to public health funding.

The coalition behind this case was led by New Jersey’s Davenport alongside California Attorney General Rob Bonta, Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul and Rhode Island Attorney General Peter F. Neronha. It was joined by the attorneys general of Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, as well as the District of Columbia and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, according to the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office.

The states filed an amended complaint on 21 August 2025, arguing that Congress had established formulas and eligibility requirements for distributing the grants without authorising the Justice Department to condition funding on cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, according to the Jersey Vindicator.

Judge McConnell is no stranger to this fight. In January 2025 he issued an injunction against the Trump administration’s plan to pause federal grants across the board. In June 2025 he granted a preliminary injunction to 20 states that sued the Department of Transportation over its so-called “Duffy Directive”, which tied transport grant funding to cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In that decision, he found that the government had cited “no plausible connection between cooperating with ICE enforcement and the congressionally approved purposes” of the transport department, and warned of large-scale irreparable harm to transport services without an order.

Other judges have reached similar conclusions in parallel cases. In San Jose, Judge William Orrick temporarily blocked the administration from imposing new conditions on more than $350 million in Department of Homeland Security grants distributed to more than two dozen cities and counties in California, Washington and Arizona, according to CNN. In Rhode Island, Senior Judge William E. Smith — appointed by Republican President George W. Bush — granted summary judgment to a coalition of 20 Democratic state attorneys general and permanently enjoined the Department of Homeland Security from conditioning disaster relief funding on state cooperation with immigration enforcement, finding the conditions “arbitrary and capricious” and “coercive, ambiguous, unrelated to the purpose of the federal grants”, according to the Associated Press.

The pattern is now unmistakable: across multiple courts, multiple judges and multiple grant programmes, the administration’s strategy of using federal money as leverage over immigration policy has repeatedly failed to survive judicial scrutiny.

A familiar fight with a long history

The Byrne JAG programme sits at the centre of this dispute, and its history explains why the states fought so hard to protect it. The programme was created by the Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act of 2005, which merged two earlier programmes — the Edward Byrne Memorial Formula Grant and the Local Law Enforcement Block Grant — into a single stream of funding, according to the Congressional Research Service.

It is named for Edward Byrne, a 22-year-old New York City police officer who was shot dead in the early hours of 26 February 1988 while guarding the home of a witness who had agreed to testify against local drug dealers. The Byrne grant programmes were authorised by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, and the merged JAG programme has since become the backbone of federal support for state and local criminal justice, awarding more than 22,000 grants worth more than $7 billion between 2005 and 2022, according to the Connecticut Office of Policy and Management, citing the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the National Criminal Justice Association. Funding has averaged about $440 million per fiscal year since 2005, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The money is divided by a formula, not by discretion: 60 per cent goes directly to the state government and 40 per cent goes directly to units of local government within the state. For decades, the programme operated on the understanding that the formula, not the politics of the moment, decided who received what.

That understanding was first tested in the president’s first term. Between 2017 and 2020, eight states had Byrne JAG funds withheld after the Justice Department placed immigration-related conditions on the programme, according to the Connecticut Office of Policy and Management. Those conditions were challenged in court — most famously in the case brought by the City of Chicago — and the courts repeatedly ruled against the administration. The current case is, in many respects, the second round of the same fight, with the same programme, the same legal arguments and, so far, the same outcome.

The constitutional question at the heart of the case is an old one. The Supreme Court set out the limits on Congress’s power to attach conditions to federal money in South Dakota v. Dole in 1987: conditions must be unambiguous, must be related to the federal interest in the programme, and must not be so coercive that they amount to compulsion. In NFIB v. Sebelius in 2012, the court added that the federal government cannot use the threat of losing existing funding to force states to accept a new programme they would otherwise reject. The states’ argument in this case drew on both principles: that the immigration conditions were unrelated to the purposes Congress set for criminal justice grants, and that threatening to withhold money Congress had already promised was coercive.

Analysis: Why It Matters

The courts are drawing a line the administration keeps crossing

The most important thing about this ruling is not that it is new, but that it is not. Judge McConnell’s decision is the latest in a lengthening list of judgments — from Rhode Island, from California, from courts across the country — that have struck down the same tactic in different forms. The administration has tried to condition transport money, disaster money, homeland security money and now criminal justice money on immigration cooperation. In each case, judges have found the same defect: the executive branch cannot rewrite the terms Congress set for money Congress appropriated.

That consistency matters because it suggests the problem is not a single badly drafted condition or a single overreaching official, but a governing strategy that is colliding with a constitutional limit. The power of the purse belongs to Congress. When a president uses the threat of withholding money to compel states to do something Congress never asked them to do, he is not merely being tough on immigration — he is reaching beyond the powers of his office. The courts, including judges appointed by presidents of both parties, have now said so repeatedly, and the administration has not yet found a version of this policy that survives contact with a judge.

There is also a practical lesson here for the states. The coalition that won this case was not built overnight: it grew out of the first lawsuit in August 2025, adapted when the administration shifted the conditions to new programmes, and held together across 22 states and the District of Columbia. The attorneys general who lead these cases have learned to litigate quickly, in friendly venues, and to keep their coalitions intact while the administration changes tactics. That machinery is now well practised, and it will be used again.

The timing is political, even if the law is not

The ruling landed on Wednesday, the day after the midterm elections of 3 November, in which Democrats won control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate in a sweeping repudiation of the Trump administration. The result was confirmed by multiple outlets, and the political consequences were already visible within hours: the Speaker of the House stepped aside, the markets rallied, and the president devoted his first post-election public appearance to the construction of a White House ballroom rather than to the election result.

It would be a mistake to read the court ruling as a product of the election. The case was filed in August 2025, the legal arguments were settled months ago, and Judge McConnell’s reasoning follows directly from his own earlier decisions in the transport-grants case and the funding-freeze case. The judiciary does not take its cues from the ballot box.

But the timing still matters, because the ruling and the election now reinforce each other. From January 2027, a Democratic Congress will control the power of the purse, the oversight committees and the confirmation process. The president will need that Congress to fund his priorities — including any further escalation of the war with Iran, which he himself acknowledged may have contributed to his party’s losses. A Democratic House, with Richard Neal expected to return to the chairmanship of the tax- and trade-focused House Ways and Means Committee, will be able to investigate the administration’s use of grant conditions, to hold hearings on the programmes affected, and to write appropriations bills that explicitly forbid the conditions the courts have now struck down. The ruling gives Congress a judicial foundation to build on; the election gives it the votes.

For the administration, the combination is sobering. The courts have closed one avenue of pressure on the states, and the voters have closed another: the ability to govern without negotiating. The president retains his veto, and the Democrats’ majorities are not large enough to override it on their own. But the era in which the White House could govern by executive action and funding threats alone — the era of what one French newspaper called the “Caesar-like presidency” — has ended on two fronts in the same week.

What this means for policing on the ground

Beyond the constitutional drama, the ruling has an immediate practical effect. Police departments, prosecutors and youth programmes in the 22 plaintiff states and the District of Columbia can now draw down their Byrne JAG money without accepting conditions that would have required them to hand over people in their custody to federal immigration officers and to alert the Department of Homeland Security before releasing them.

That matters because of what the money actually buys. Byrne JAG grants fund the unglamorous, day-to-day work of criminal justice: protective equipment for officers, gang investigations, drug treatment programmes, court technology, crime prevention and support for victims. In New Jersey, the money helps pay for the enforcement of Megan’s Law, the state’s sex-offender registration system, and for the search for violent criminals. In Oregon, it funds programmes that keep young people out of the justice system in the first place. None of that work has anything to do with federal immigration enforcement, and the states’ argument — accepted by the judge — was that it should not be held hostage to it.

The ruling also protects a principle that local law enforcement has defended for years: that community trust depends on a clear line between local policing and federal immigration enforcement. When residents believe that a call to the police, or cooperation with a local investigation, could lead to immigration consequences for themselves or their families, they stop calling and stop cooperating. That makes it harder to solve crimes, to protect witnesses and to keep neighbourhoods safe. The states that sued argued that the administration’s conditions would have forced them to choose between federal money and the trust of their own communities. The judge’s ruling means they do not have to make that choice.

The limits of the victory

The ruling should not be overstated. The permanent injunction protects the states that brought the case. It does not, on its own, protect the states that did not sue, and it does not prevent the administration from trying a different legal route to the same end. The Justice Department can appeal to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, and the administration has appealed adverse rulings before — sometimes successfully, sometimes not. A written order will follow the bench ruling, and its precise scope will matter: whether it covers all three grant programmes, whether it extends to future conditions of the same kind, and how the department is expected to administer the grants in the meantime.

There is also the question of what the administration does next. In the earlier dispute over crime-victim funds, the government backed down when sued, then reimposed similar conditions on different programmes. That pattern — retreat, repackage, repeat — suggests the fight is not over. The states have won this round decisively, but they have won rounds before, in 2017 and again in 2025, only to find the same policy returning in a new form.

What has changed is the cumulative weight of the defeats. Each ruling adds to a body of law that makes the next attempt harder to defend, and each ruling gives the next court a precedent to follow. The administration may yet find a lawful way to link federal funding to immigration cooperation — by persuading Congress to write such conditions into law, for example — but it cannot do so by executive fiat. That is the line Judge McConnell has now drawn, in terms that will be difficult for an appeals court to ignore.

What happens next

The Justice Department has not yet said whether it will appeal, and it did not respond to a request for comment on the ruling. If it does appeal, the case will go to the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, which hears appeals from the District of Rhode Island. An appeal would take months, during which the injunction would remain in force unless the appeals court stayed it.

In the meantime, the plaintiff states can access their grants without the immigration conditions, and the Justice Department must administer the Byrne JAG, Byrne State Crisis Intervention and juvenile justice programmes on the terms Congress set. The ruling also stands as a warning to other federal agencies that have attached similar conditions to their own grants: the courts are watching, the states are organised, and the legal theory has now been tested — and rejected — in several different courtrooms.

The broader contest over federal funding and immigration enforcement will continue, in Congress as well as in the courts. But for now, the states that sued have their money, their programmes and their principle intact — and the administration has one more court judgment telling it that the power of the purse is not its to wield.

Sources

• Reuters — “US judge rules DOJ cannot link states’ grant funding to immigration enforcement” (4 November 2026)
• New Jersey Office of the Attorney General — “Attorney General Davenport, Multistate Coalition Win Major Case Protecting Crucial Law Enforcement Funding” (4 November 2026)
• Oregon Department of Justice — “AG Rayfield Wins Case Protecting Funding for Oregon Youth Programs” (4 November 2026)
• Jersey Vindicator — “Federal judge blocks Trump administration from tying police grants to immigration enforcement” (4 November 2026)
• Congressional Research Service — “Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) Program: In Brief”