Trump said Tuesday that starting Feb. 1 his administration will deny federal funding to any states that have local governments he described as sanctuary jurisdictions, expanding on previous threats to cut off resources to the sanctuary cities themselves.
In remarks that he gave late in a speech Tuesday at the Detroit Economic Club, Trump said, “Starting Feb. 1, we’re not making any payments to sanctuary cities or states having sanctuary cities, because they do everything possible to protect criminals at the expense of American citizens and it breeds fraud and crime and all of the other problems that come.” He added: “So we’re not making any payment to anybody that supports sanctuary cities.”
When reporters asked in Washington what kind of funding would be affected starting Feb 1, Trump responded, “You’ll see,” and said, “It’ll be significant.”
The terms “sanctuary policies” and “sanctuary cities” do not have a strict, single definition, but the AP report said they generally describe limited cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The announcement came amid a history of legal challenges to the administration’s efforts to use funding leverage against sanctuary jurisdictions. The AP report said two previous efforts by Trump to cut off some funding for sanctuary jurisdictions were shut down by courts.
Last year, the administration directed federal officials to withhold money from sanctuary jurisdictions that seek to shield people in the country illegally from deportation, according to the AP report. A California-based federal judge struck down that plan, after government lawyers argued it was too early to stop the effort because no action had been taken and no specific conditions had been laid out.
In Trump’s first term, courts also struck down an effort to cut funding to cities, the AP report said, describing the challenge as occurring in 2017.
The AP report said the Justice Department last year published a list that it considers to include three dozen states, cities and counties as sanctuary jurisdictions. The report said the list was overwhelmingly made up of places where governments are controlled by Democrats, including California, Connecticut and New York at the state level, and Boston and New York at the city level, as well as Baltimore County, Maryland, and Cook County, Illinois, at the county level.
The AP report said the Justice Department list replaced an earlier, longer one that drew pushback from officials who said it was not clear why their jurisdictions were on the list.
The sanctuary funding threat was also described by the AP as part of a broader set of recent federal funding actions that the administration has threatened or attempted, many of which are already facing legal challenges. The AP report said the U.S. Department of Agriculture warned states that refused to provide data on recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program money that they would be docked administrative funds, and that a court fight over the request for information was already under way before the warning, with money not yet stopped.
The AP report said the U.S. Department of Health and Social Services told lawmakers last week it was halting money from five Democratic-led states for daycare subsidies and other aid to low-income families with children over unspecified suspicions about fraud, and that a court put that action on hold.
In Minnesota, the AP report said the administration has tried to use additional financial pressure. It said the Agriculture Department has said it is freezing funding in the state, and that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services told Minnesota it intends to withhold $515 million every three months from 14 Medicaid programs deemed “high risk,” after the programs rejected a corrective action plan CMS demanded because of fraud allegations.
The AP report said Minnesota officials told reporters Tuesday that they are appealing, and that the withheld amount is equivalent to one-fourth of the federal money for those Medicaid programs.