Judge strikes down Trump’s bid to cut states’ anti-terror funds unless they impose new voting restrictions

The Trump administration cannot leverage grants meant to help prevent terrorist attacks to force states and local governments to adopt a slate of new anti-voting measures, a federal judge ruled Monday in a major win for voters.

U.S. District Judge Amir Ali found that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) likely violated federal law in conditioning hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding on changes to how states and local jurisdictions administer elections.

Ali ruled in favor of Nashville and Davidson County in Tennessee, Harris and El Paso Counties in Texas, and Columbus, Ohio — all of which sued the Trump administration last month over the effort.

In June, FEMA announced that it would withhold 20% of DHS’s $1 billion Homeland Security Grant Program from states and municipal governments unless they complied with new anti-voting measures sought by the Trump administration.

To receive grants under the new conditions, states would have been required to run their full voter registration records through a DHS immigration database that the Trump administration has attempted to retrofit into a massive tool to directly shape who can vote.

States and local governments would also have needed to stop using certain election equipment, alter their ballot and audit procedures, and adopt other changes to receive full funding, all of which would have cost millions of dollars. 

Ali, a Biden nominee, found that FEMA had no “authority to extract unfunded reforms from states in exchange for grants.”

“FEMA’s conditions here—which are imposed on states and localities at their own expense, rather than funded by grants, and which address routine election administration decisions rather than the types of terrorist act threats contemplated by the statute—go beyond what Congress authorized,” the judge wrote.

Ali’s ruling came just days after the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to revive the use of the immigration database — called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) — in verifying the citizenship of voters. 

The Court stayed a lower-court ruling finding that the Trump administration’s use of SAVE, which routinely flags eligible voters as noncitizens, to vet state voter rolls “trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”

In that case, the Trump administration claimed that SAVE was legal in part because it exists solely as a voluntary tool for states. But under FEMA’s new conditions, the Trump administration attempted to force states and localities to use SAVE or risk losing out on millions of dollars in grants.

Ali’s ruling is also a major victory for a group of 25 states and Washington, D.C., that separately sued the Trump administration over the grant conditions.