Trump continues to flout court orders by tying FEMA funding to ICE cooperation

By Erik Uebelacker | Courthouse News Service

(CN) — Despite several court orders barring the Trump administration from making Federal Emergency Management Agency funding conditional on immigration enforcement, a coalition of states say the government is continuing to do just that.

As a result, the states claim they’re being strong-armed into cooperating with federal deportation efforts to receive nearly $1 billion in congressionally approved counterterrorism and emergency management funds — precisely the situation U.S. District Judge William Smith already deemed unlawful last year.

In September 2025, Smith blocked FEMA from enforcing new requirements that would have effectively withheld disaster aid from states with sanctuary immigration laws. A month later, Smith scolded the government for ignoring his order and trying to do it anyway. He reiterated that further comparable attempts to tie this aid to immigration enforcement would be unlawful.

On Wednesday, the states filed a motion asking the court to enforce that injunction once again. They claim the government is now trying to impose these conditions on several of its grant programs for the 2026 fiscal year, and many of the conditions are worded identically to the ones Smith barred a year ago.

“FEMA has violated a court order permanently enjoining it from applying immigration-enforcement conditions to federal grant funds with the result that plaintiff states are unable to accept hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Homeland Security funding that Congress appropriated for their use,” the states wrote.

In the 18-page filing, they included the text of several of the conditions. One bars restrictions on information sharing between local law enforcement and federal immigration agents. Another requires ICE to have access to any locally detained individual it wishes. A third mandates that state officials “will not leak or otherwise publicize the existence of an immigration enforcement operation.”

These requirements, among others, are indistinguishable from those Smith already scrutinized in 2025.

The states already have an active lawsuit, filed this summer, challenging the new requirements for FEMA grant funding. They argue they shouldn’t be forced to file new challenges to conditions Smith already barred.

“FEMA should not be permitted to serially reissue substantively identical immigration conditions year after year and force states to litigate each set of substantively identical terms on a blank slate,” they claim. “This court entered an injunction last year permanently enjoining FEMA from enforcing the terms in question, and FEMA has disobeyed that injunction.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees both ICE and FEMA, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The initial lawsuit was brought in May 2025. More than two dozen states accused the administration of holding emergency relief hostage in order to push the White House’s anti-immigration agenda onto Democratic states.

They likened the threat to a “Sword of Damocles,” forcing them to choose between the independence of their local law enforcement arms and their readiness for emergencies.

Smith ruled last year that the states were right.

“The combination of overbreadth, disregard for reliance interests, and failure to consider public safety and possible alternatives makes it clear that DHS’s decision does not comply with the [Administrative Procedure Act],” Smith said in his opinion, admonishing the federal government’s overreach.

A month later, Smith said the department defied that order when it tried to implement a workaround: adding a trigger clause that would allow the states to take the FEMA funding, but on the condition they’d be forced to comply with the immigration provisions if an appellate court ruled in the government’s favor. Smith called the novel condition a “ham-handed attempt to bully the states into making promises they have no obligation to make.”

This time around, a new judge will have to weigh in. Smith, a George W. Bush appointee, retired from the bench on Jan. 21.