Federal judge says Trump administration must restore disaster money to Democratic states

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration's attempt to reallocate federal Homeland Security funding away from states that refuse to cooperate with certain federal immigration enforcement.

U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy's ruling on Monday solidified a win for the coalition of 12 attorneys general that sued the administration earlier this year after being alerted that their states would receive drastically reduced federal grants due to their ''sanctuary'' jurisdictions.

In total, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency reduced more than $233 million from Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. The money is part of a $1 billion program where allocations are supposed to be based on assessed risks, with states then largely passing most of the money on to police and fire departments.

The cuts were unveiled shortly after a separate federal judge in a different legal challenge ruled it was unconstitutional for the federal government to require states to cooperate on immigration enforcement actions to get FEMA disaster funding.

In her 48-page ruling, McElroy found that the federal government was weighing states' police on federal immigration enforcement on whether to reduce federal funding for the Homeland Security Grant Program and others.

''What else could defendants' decisions to cut funding to specific counterterrorism programming by conspicuous round numbered amounts — including by slashing off the millions-place digits of awarded sums — be if not arbitrary and capricious? Neither a law degree nor a degree in mathematics is required to deduce that no plausible, rational formula could produce this result,'' McElroy wrote.

The Trump-appointed judge then ordered the Department of Homeland Security to restore the previously announced funding allocations to the plaintiff states.

McElroy notably cited the recent Brown University attack, where a gunman killed two students and injured nine others, as an event where the $1 billion federal program would be vital in responding to such a tragedy.

''To hold hostage funding for programs like these based solely on what appear to be defendants' political whims is unconscionable and, at least here, unlawful,'' the Rhode Island-based judge wrote in her ruling, issued little more than a week after the Brown shooting.

Emails seeking comment were sent to the DHS and FEMA.