(Reuters) -A federal judge on Thursday blocked Donald Trump’s administration from withholding federal funding from more than a dozen so-called sanctuary jurisdictions that have declined to cooperate with the Republican president’s hardline immigration crackdown.
U.S. District Judge William Orrick in San Francisco issued the injunction at the request of 16 cities and counties nationally. San Francisco, which led the lawsuit, in its complaint filed in February argued that the Trump administration was unlawfully trying to force local officials to cooperate with federal immigration arrests.
The jurisdictions include the cities of Minneapolis; New Haven, Connecticut; Portland, Oregon; St. Paul, Minnesota; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Seattle, which have laws and policies that limit or prevent local law enforcement from assisting federal officers with civil immigration arrests.
Supporters of such laws have said that cooperation with federal immigration enforcement would discourage immigrants who are living in the U.S. illegally from coming forward as victims or witnesses to crimes.
The lawsuit challenges an executive order Trump signed that threatens to cut off federal funding to sanctuary jurisdictions that limit or refuse to cooperate with federal immigration law enforcement, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“The threat to withhold funding causes them irreparable injury in the form of budgetary uncertainty, deprivation of constitutional rights, and undermining trust between the Cities and Counties and the communities they serve,” Orrick said.
During his first term as president, Trump in 2017 signed a similar executive order targeting sanctuary jurisdictions. San Francisco sued then, too, leading Orrick to block the policy in a ruling that was upheld by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
“Here we are again,” Orrick, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, wrote on Thursday.
Orrick said a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of Trump’s latest executive order was likewise warranted as the local jurisdictions had established that Trump’s order likely unconstitutionally imposed conditions on federal funding without congressional authorization and ran afoul of the localities’ due process rights.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Justice, which is defending Trump’s policy, in a statement said it “will continue to fight in court to defend President Trump’s agenda to crack down against policies that benefit criminal illegal aliens.”
The 16 localities brought their lawsuit a day after the Department of Justice sued the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago, seeking a court order blocking sanctuary laws that the Democratic-led jurisdictions adopted that the Justice Department said were interfering with Trump’s agenda.
The Justice Department has also filed a lawsuit challenging a New York law that bars the Democratic-led state from sharing vehicle and address information with federal immigration authorities.
Orrick cited those two lawsuits as a key reason why the 16 jurisdictions that sued have an even stronger reason to fear the administration will enforce Trump’s order than they had during his first term in office.
“We are pleased the court stated the Trump administration cannot coerce plaintiffs into joining their reckless and illegal mass deportation efforts,” San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu, a Democrat who pursued the lawsuit, said in a statement.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Will Dunham, Alexia Garamfalvi and Leslie Adler)
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