Illinois seeks to prevent feds from tying funding for states to immigration enforcement

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul and 19 other Democratic attorneys general filed a pair of lawsuits Tuesday against Trump administration policies designed to block federal funding to states that don’t carry out U.S. immigration enforcement.

According to the lawsuits, recently enacted policies at the U.S. departments of Homeland Security and Transportation illegally tie grant funding for items such as natural disaster recovery and road construction to whether the state participates in federal immigration enforcement. The attorneys general say the goal of the policies is to illegally force states to carry out federal immigration responsibilities.

“This FEMA and transportation funding has nothing to do with immigration,” Raoul said during a news conference. “However, it has everything to do with the safety of our residents after natural disasters and as they travel our roads, railways and in the sky.”

Under the 2017 TRUST Act signed by Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, Illinois law enforcement is prohibited from arresting and, in most cases, detaining a person based solely on their immigration status or assisting immigration officials. State law does not protect people in Illinois from deportation, and federal officers still can make arrests and deport people in Illinois.

The federal policy is illegal, according to the attorneys general, because Congress controls spending and executive branch agencies cannot withhold appropriations allocated by Congress. Furthermore, they argue the states cannot be coerced into enforcing federal immigration laws.

President Donald Trump has signed executive orders designed to cut off federal funding to “sanctuary” states like Illinois. The U.S. Department of Justice also sued Illinois in February over the TRUST Act.

“The administration seeks to jeopardize readiness for disasters and safe roads to try to force Illinois law enforcement officers to shift their focus away from addressing serious crime in our communities in order to instead do the federal government’s job of civil immigration enforcement,” Raoul said.

Billions of dollars of federal funding could be at risk for Illinois, Raoul said. This includes $122 million Illinois received last year for disaster recovery, $2 billion for highways, $60 million for counterterrorism, and $24 million to protect nonprofits from attacks by extremists.

“At a time when the disaster relief and transportation needs of this country are significant, we deserve to know our federal agencies are focused on the welfare of all of us,” Raoul said.

The lawsuits come a week after DHS Secretary Kristi Noem visited Illinois to criticize the state’s “sanctuary” policies.

“This governor has bragged about Illinois being a firewall against President Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda, and it is very clear that he is violating the constitution of the United States because it is a federal law that the federal government set and enforce immigration policies,” Noem said.

Raoul also argued the federal government has never before allocated funding based on whether a state agrees with the president’s political agenda.

No states have lost funding so far as a result of these policies, but it’s “imminent,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said. He did not say why the lawsuits were filed in Rhode Island federal court, which is where Democratic attorneys general have filed many other lawsuits against the Trump administration.

Raoul has seen some success in the more than a dozen lawsuits against the Trump administration his office is involved in. A federal judge in New York last week issued a preliminary injunction blocking a U.S. Department of Education effort to cut off some federal funding to states, giving Illinois access to $77 million.

Illinois has also joined other lawsuits to prevent the Department of Education from being dismantled, ensure the state continues to have access to various types of federal funding, and prevent the federal government from limiting birthright citizenship among others.

The cases appear to be straining his offices’ resources, however, as Raoul is asking state lawmakers to increase funding for his office by $15 million this year to hire more attorneys.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.