The Justice Department is dangling nearly $1 billion in public safety grants in front of cities and police departments nationwide — but with a condition that critics say is designed to freeze out Democratic-led communities.
The grants announced this month comes with a catch requiring local officials to work with federal immigration officers as the Trump administration works to draw local police deeper into immigration enforcement in the wake of widely criticized federal surges in cities like Minneapolis and Chicago, reported NPR.
"They are trying to take dollars that local agencies have been depending on for years and saying, 'Oh, well, if you want these dollars, then you need to help us out with our immigration enforcement work,'" said Tahir Duckett, executive director of the Center for Innovations in Community Safety at Georgetown Law.
About $700 million comes through the DOJ's long-running COPS grant program, which has funneled more than $20 billion to local police departments since 1994 for everything from hiring officers to school safety initiatives. An additional $300 million — a new program called the Model Cities Initiative, created under Trump's tax-and-spending law — will go to just two to four midsize cities, with the DOJ bypassing its standard competitive peer-review process in favor of direct review by agency leadership.
Buried in the fine print is a mandate that any program that "impedes or hinders" federal immigration enforcement, including failing to honor requests from the Department of Homeland Security, won't be funded. The COPS grants similarly give "priority consideration" to jurisdictions that cooperate with immigration authorities.
"That is highly unusual and especially concerning, because the grants appear to be bypassing the standard competitive peer review process," Amy Solomon, senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice and former head of the DOJ's Office of Justice Programs, told NPR.
Teams of reviewers with expertise in diverse subjects would typically evaluate the grant applications, but critics say the new plan would have he practical effect of shutting out Democratic-led cities entirely.
What's the end result? The only cities and localities that apply are Republican-led cities," said Insha Rahman of the Vera Institute of Justice, predicting the administration will use the contrast on the campaign trail to paint Democrats as soft on crime.
Police chiefs have long resisted entangling local law enforcement with immigration enforcement, warning it erodes community trust and discourages witnesses from cooperating with investigations. Research has also found immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than U.S.-born citizens, and federal data shows more than 70 percent of current immigrant detainees have no criminal convictions — undercutting the administration's public safety rationale.
The DOJ declined an interview request, but in a statement called the disconnect between immigration and public safety "ludicrous," touting the arrests of "hundreds of thousands of criminal illegal aliens" including alleged terrorists and gang members. DHS, meanwhile, said cities refusing cooperation force federal agents into a "more visible presence" in their communities.
The first Trump administration tried a similar tactic, but it was challenged in court and later reversed under President Joe Biden.