By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) – A federal judge warned on Friday that a new executive order from President Donald Trump that calls for cutting off funding to so-called sanctuary jurisdictions that do not cooperate with his immigration agenda cannot be used to evade a court order barring his administration from doing just that.
U.S. District Judge William Orrick in San Francisco issued Friday’s order at the urging of 16 cities and counties nationally that had already secured an injunction barring the administration from withholding all federal funding to them.
Those cities and counties, led by San Francisco, sued after Trump signed two earlier executive orders in January and February that they said unlawfully threatened to cut off funding to them unless they cooperated with federal immigration law enforcement, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The jurisdictions include the cities of Minneapolis; New Haven, Connecticut; Portland, Oregon; St. Paul, Minnesota; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Seattle, all of which have laws and policies that limit or prevent local law enforcement from assisting federal officers with civil immigration arrests.
Four days after Orrick issued the injunction in April, Trump signed a new executive order directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to create a list of sanctuary jurisdictions and for agencies to then identify grants and other funding to them they could cancel or suspend.
The 16 local governments argued Trump issued the new executive order in “blatant disregard” for Orrick’s court order and urged him to enforce his injunction.
Orrick, who during Trump’s first term in office blocked enforcement of a similar 2017 executive order targeting sanctuary jurisdictions, said on Friday that the latest order had some material differences from the earlier ones and, in some respects, may even resolve problems he identified in them.
He said the administration could potentially identify funds to rescind if there was enough of a connection between the funding stream and the jurisdiction’s “sanctuary” policies.
But Orrick said if Trump’s latest order was used to instead target funds unrelated to sanctuary policies, their suspension would violate the U.S. Constitution just as the earlier executive orders did.
He said the context surrounding Trump’s new order raises the threat that the government would use it “to unconstitutionally coerce the cities and Counties (and other jurisdictions like them) into changing their policies and practices to conform with the second Trump administration’s preferences.”
San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu in a statement said Friday’s order “makes clear that the federal government cannot use Executive Orders or other agency action to withhold federal funding as a coercive threat against sanctuary jurisdictions.”
The U.S. Department of Justice did not respond to requests for comment.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
