Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem had no right to withhold nearly $34 million in anti-terror grants for the MTA as a punishment for New York’s sanctuary policies. That is an obvious conclusion, but it took Manhattan Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan to put it into writing, ordering the illegal move reversed.
As the judge wrote yesterday, “Here, Congress did not authorize the DHS Secretary to fix immigration-related terms or conditions on the disbursement of Transit Security Grant Program funds. To the contrary, Congress prohibited DHS from imposing such terms by requiring the selection of grant recipients to be ‘based solely on risk.’ ” That’s worth repeating, “based solely on risk.”
And New York is the No. 1 target for terrorists. That means the most risk. Kaplan invoked 9/11, in case Noem, whose very agency was created after that attack, wasn’t aware of the devastation.
The administration attempts to do unlawful things essentially daily, but this is notable insofar as it has attempted almost his exact policy multiple times across both Donald Trump terms — attempting to tie some kind of previously-allocated funding to local and state cooperation with administration agenda items, particularly immigration enforcement — and been often unsuccessful.
These efforts are a mix of legal violations: the administration wants to violate impoundment principles meant to prevent the executive from simply refusing to disburse funds appropriated by Congress; it is violating anti-commandeering principles that since the dawn of our nation as a federalized system have prevented the federal government from taking over or directing state and local governments to carry out their own policies; and it is violating the statute governing these specific grants, which sets out specific requirements for disbursements that have nothing to do with cooperation on immigration enforcement, all in one go.
In doing so, it is also stripping funding from law enforcement entities — in this case, funding earmarked for terrorism prevention — while at the same time predicating its incursions into Democratic cities on the specious argument that they are hotbeds of crime and chaos, all in service of pushing an agenda that local law enforcement around the country have said erodes trust and is counterproductive to public safety.
It’s also no secret that the subways in particular are a significant potential soft target for those who might want to harm New Yorkers. We are a city that is unfortunately painfully aware of the devastation of acts of targeted terror.
You may remember that this is just one of the pools of federal anti-terrorism funding that Trump attempted to suddenly cut from New York. He had also targeted some $187 million in separate grant funding for the state as a whole, before backing down in the wake of well-deserved public pressure and political heat.
The fact that Trump rolled back his decision upon seeing the outcry from his native city is a clear indication that there is no sensible process actually underlying these decisions. It is simply Trump himself and a small group of viziers like Stephen Miller and Russ Vought who are making decisions about huge parts of the federal government unilaterally and considering their own ideological ends as opposed to any responsibility to the American public as a whole.
If past is prologue, we know that getting slapped down here once again won’t stop Trump from simply continuing to try this gambit, with federal funding of all sorts — safety, transportation, education, health, housing and so on. Each dollar of federal funds going anywhere in New York could be an opportunity for this administration.
It is simply impracticable for a federal judge to have to be briefed and step in every single time. We must see real and tangible consequences for officials directing unlawful actions, or they’ll learn nothing.
