Attorney General Dan Rayfield filed a lawsuit today to stop the Trump administration from holding billions of dollars in federal counterterrorism funding hostage to force states to fall in line with the administration’s partisan political agenda. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island by a coalition of 26 states.
The FEMA funding comes from Congress, and it’s meant for one thing: keeping our communities safe by helping states prepare for and respond to emergencies, natural disasters and acts of terrorism. But the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are trying to attach new political conditions to it – conditions that have nothing to do with public safety.
“The Trump Administration is playing politics with people’s lives and with the safety of our communities,” said Attorney General Rayfield. “Oregonians know firsthand what it takes to recover from wildfires, floods, and ice storms – we don’t need the federal government using natural disasters or terrorist threats to score political points.”
To keep the funding, states would have to overhaul how they run elections – including handing DHS the personal information of every registered voter – and help federal agents enforce immigration law. On top of that, DHS wants the power to cut off any grant, at any time, for any reason.
AG Rayfield already won two similar lawsuits in 2025, both in federal court in Rhode Island. One involved DHS trying to condition emergency funding on states helping enforce immigration law. The other was over DHS trying to punish states it saw as insufficiently loyal to the President’s agenda by pulling their homeland security funding.
Now DHS and FEMA are trying again with 2026 funding. This round affects billions of dollars nationwide, including more than a billion dollars in Homeland Security Grant Program (HSGP) money that states rely on to guard against terrorism, cyberattacks and other threats. Oregon alone gets almost $10 million a year in HSGP funding to help state and local agencies prevent, prepare for and respond to acts of terrorism.
Here’s what DHS and FEMA are demanding this time:
- Help enforce immigration law. DHS and FEMA are bringing back the same immigration conditions they tried to impose in 2025 – this time across all federal grant programs. States would have to pull scarce law enforcement resources away from their own priorities to help DHS enforce federal immigration law.
- Change election laws or lose funding. States that don’t rewrite their election laws to match the administration’s preferences stand to lose 20% of their counterterrorism funding. That would mean walking away from years of work and millions of dollars states have already invested in their election systems – just to keep money Congress set aside for stopping terrorist attacks, not running elections.
- Give up any real guarantee the funding will stay put. The new conditions would also let FEMA cancel any grant, for any reason, at any time. That kind of constant uncertainty makes it nearly impossible for states to plan and rely on programs that are supposed to keep people safe.
AG Rayfield and the other attorneys general argue these conditions break the law twice over – violating both the federal Administrative Procedure Act and the Spending Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Alongside AG Rayfield in this lawsuit are the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, and the governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania.
