A federal judge in Rhode Island has permanently blocked the Trump administration from tying federal police grants to immigration cooperation, ruling that the Justice Department exceeded its authority when it attached immigration-enforcement conditions to public safety money Congress created for state and local criminal justice programs.
Chief U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell Jr. ruled from the bench on Wednesday, November 4, in the case brought by New Jersey and a coalition of 22 states and Washington, D.C., and permanently barred the Justice Department from enforcing the conditions against the states that sued. The conditions required grant recipients to give federal immigration officers access to people held in state custody who were suspected of being in the country unlawfully, and to notify the Department of Homeland Security before those people were released.
New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport, whose office helped lead the case, said civil immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility and not a state government responsibility. "When the feds put politics above public safety, we'll fight back — and we'll win," she wrote after the ruling. The coalition was co-led by the attorneys general of California, Delaware, Illinois and Rhode Island.
The permanent injunction covers the immigration conditions the Justice Department attached to the Byrne State Crisis Intervention Program and to juvenile justice formula grants; conditions on the larger Byrne Justice Assistance Grant program had already been blocked by an earlier injunction in the same case. New Jersey alone was allocated about $4.2 million in Byrne grants for fiscal year 2025 and another $2.7 million through the crisis intervention program — money the states use for police equipment, gang investigations, mental health programs and juvenile justice.
The fight began in 2025, when the administration put immigration conditions on more than $1.3 billion in Victims of Crime Act funding; the conditions were dropped after the states sued, but this year the Justice Department applied similar conditions to the new law-enforcement and juvenile justice grants, and the states went back to court. The ruling binds only the states that sued — it does not stop federal immigration enforcement itself — and the Justice Department has issued no public response to it.
For police departments and sheriffs in the 22 states and Washington, D.C., the ruling means the federal grant money for equipment, investigations and violence-prevention programs keeps flowing without departments having to take on federal immigration duties as the price of receiving it.
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