President Trump Wednesday threatened to cut off federal funds on Feb. 1 to all states that include immigrant-friendly sanctuary cities like New York, which he derided as “criminal protection centers.”
Trump said the feds wouldn’t provide any more assistance to states that include sanctuary cities, a list that would include Democratic-led economic powerhouses like New York, California and Illinois.
“No more payments will be made by the federal government to states for their corrupt criminal protection centers known as sanctuary cities,” he wrote on his social media site. “All they do is breed crime and violence.”
Although Trump did not specify which states he would target or exactly what funding could be affected, he vowed late Tuesday that the move would “be significant.”
“We’re not making any payment to anybody that supports sanctuary cities,” Trump said in a Detroit speech that was supposed to focus on economic policy.
It would also likely target Minnesota, where hundreds of federal agents are engaged in a wide crackdown against immigrants and their supporters after last week’s killing of unarmed motorist Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent.
New York ranks among the states that contribute the most to the federal government while receiving less in return from Uncle Sam, although all states received more from the feds than they paid out during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report by Controller Tom DiNapoli last year.
The Empire State generated $320 billion in federal tax revenue in fiscal year 2023 while receiving $337 billion back from the feds, or about $1.06 for every dollar sent to D.C., the report said. California ranks on top of most lists of biggest net contributors to the federal government, followed by other Democratic-led states like New York, Washington, Massachusetts and New Jersey, all of which could be targets of Trump’s new threatened action.
The threat would expand on Trump’s previous threats to cut off resources to the so-called sanctuary cities themselves, and would likely spark immediate court challenges from the states affected.
Two previous efforts by Trump to unilaterally cut aid over immigration policy disputes were shut down by courts.
In executive orders last year, the president directed federal officials to withhold money from sanctuary jurisdictions that seek to shield people in the country illegally from deportation.
A California-based federal judge struck it down despite government lawyers saying no specific conditions had been laid out. In Trump’s first term in office, courts also struck down his effort to cut funding to the cities.
The Justice Department last year published a list of three dozen states, cities and counties that it considers to be sanctuary jurisdictions.
