By Karen Sloan and Mike Scarcella
(Reuters) -A judge in Washington on Wednesday temporarily blocked the U.S. Department of Justice from canceling $3.2 million in grants to the American Bar Association to train lawyers to represent victims of domestic and sexual violence.
The ABA sued the Justice Department in April, claiming the agency illegally terminated federal grants in retaliation for the lawyer organization’s public criticism of U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper granted the ABA’s request for a preliminary injunction to stop the government from terminating the grants as the case moves forward.
“The First Amendment injury is concrete and ongoing,” Cooper wrote in his opinion. “The ABA regularly engages in protected expressive activity, and DOJ’s termination of its grants directly punishes that activity.”
The Justice Department and the ABA did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the decision.
An attorney for the ABA, Skye Perryman, president and chief executive of the nonprofit legal group Democracy Forward, said in a statement Cooper’s order found that the Justice Department was unconstitutionally targeting the bar association because of its “stance on the importance of the rule of law and our Constitution.”
The ABA, which has about 150,000 members and advocates for the legal profession, said in its lawsuit that the Justice Department and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi violated free speech protections under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment by halting funding in retaliation for the ABA “taking positions the administration disfavors.”
The Justice Department terminated the grants on April 10 — one day after U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche sent a memo barring Justice Department attorneys from traveling to or speaking at ABA events, according to the complaint.
Blanche said the organization had engaged in “activist causes” contrary to the department’s mission, according to the ABA’s lawsuit.
The Justice Department asked the judge to dismiss the case, arguing that the court lacked authority to compel the federal government to pay money out under a contract.
The lawsuit is the latest in an ongoing conflict between the Trump administration and the ABA.
A Trump spokesperson in March called the ABA a “snooty” organization of “leftist lawyers” after the group said in public statements that Trump’s cutbacks to federal agencies and funding threatened the rule of law. The ABA has also condemned government officials’ attacks on judges and law firms.
In February, the ABA and other grantees of the U.S. Agency for International Development separately sued to block Trump from cutting funding to foreign aid organizations.
The ABA said in that case that it has received grant funding from the Justice Department since 1995 to fund training for lawyers and judges handling cases related to sexual and domestic violence.
The lawsuit claimed the ABA lost nearly $69 million in federal grants and had to lay off more than 300 staff members.
(Reporting by Karen Sloan and Mike Scarcella; Editing by David Bario and Aurora Ellis)
