A federal judge said Wednesday that the Trump Justice Department likely engaged in unconstitutional retaliation when it cut off grants to American Bar Association programs assisting victims of domestic violence.
The preliminary order from US District Judge Casey Cooper requires the Trump administration to pay out the $2 million in grant funding it still owes to the programs, which provide training to lawyers who work with victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse.
Cooper concluded that the terminations were connected to the ABA’s involvement in a lawsuit challenging a Trump freeze on foreign assistance, amounting to retaliation of speech protected by the First Amendment.
“The ABA regularly engages in protected expressive activity, and DOJ’s termination of its grants directly punishes that activity,” his opinion said.
The case is the latest example of a judge pushing back on President Donald Trump’s crusade against the legal industry for opposing his agenda. Conservatives have long complained that the American Bar Association has a leftwing bent and is not a neutral professional organization. But tensions have escalated in Trump’s second term, as the ABA has spoken out in defense of judges Trump has smeared for ruling against his policies. In addition to canceling the grants, Trump has taken aim at the role ABA plays in the accreditation of law schools.
The Justice Department canceled grants to the ABA’s domestic violence-related programs just a day after Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a memo barring DOJ lawyers from participating in ABA events. The memo pointed to the ABA’s participation in a lawsuit against the administration.
While the administration claimed in court filings it cancelled the grants because they were “no longer aligned with DOJ’s priorities,” Cooper wrote, the “government has not identified any nonretaliatory DOJ priorities, much less explained why they were suddenly deemed inconsistent with the goals of the affected grants.”
Furthermore, funding has continued to similar programs, and that “different treatment of other grantees suggests this justification is pretextual,” Cooper wrote.
During a hearing on Monday, an attorney for the Justice Department struggled with Cooper’s line of questioning related to that point. Asked whether other grantees were still receiving money from the department to do work to assist domestic violence victims, DOJ attorney Doug Dreier said, “That might be the case.”
Pointing to the government’s argument that the grant to ABA “no longer effectuates agency priorities,” the judge asked Dreier if he believed that similar Department of Education grants were “inconsistent with the administration?”
“I don’t think I’m authorized to comment on that,” Dreier said.
In a statement, Democracy Forward, which is representing the ABA in the case, called the ruling “welcome news for the survivors of domestic and sexual violence and their families, who rely on trauma-informed attorneys to help them stay safe.”
Spokespeople for the Justice Department did not immediately respond to CNN’s inquiry.
Trump has also hit judicial roadblocks in his efforts to implement executive orders targeting at law firms that have represented his political opponents or brought lawsuits that he opposes. Several of the executive orders – which seek to limit the access that the firms and their clients have to the federal government – have been halted in court.
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