Mikhail Zinshteyn and Cayla Mihalovich
CalMatters
Attorney General Rob Bonta on Monday August 18 filed California’s 39th lawsuit against the Trump administration, challenging new immigration enforcement requirements it placed on federal funding for crime victims.
States were set to receive more than $1.2 billion in federal crime victim funding this year, with California expected to claim $165 million. But last month, the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Victims for Crime announced that states must agree to support and assist the Department of Homeland Security with federal immigration enforcement in order to access those funds.
Some states view that condition as unworkable and the potential loss of funding could be the second significant hit this year from the Trump administration to California programs that support crime victims. Earlier this year, the U.S. Justice Department slashed grants for violence prevention and victim service programs that were initially valued at $811 million. In California alone, the department cut just over $80 million.
“Congress has never put civil immigration enforcement conditions on this funding because it has nothing to do with immigration. This is a brazen abuse of the president’s power,” Bonta said at a Monday press conference about the latest lawsuit.
California and 20 other states are suing the Trump administration over the potential cut in the U.S. District Court for Rhode Island. The states want the courts to prevent the Department of Justice from implementing the new rules.
The contested funding for crime victims supports expenses such as emergency shelter, sexual assault medical support, compensation for lost wages and funeral expenses.
The lawsuit says the Trump administration is violating the U.S. Constitution by going around Congress on how a program it created should be funded. The lawsuit also alleges that the Trump administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act, a law that is the subject of most of the lawsuits California has filed against the White House. The act says that a federal agency needs to follow procedures and explain its rationale for changing a policy.
The states allege that the Department of Justice “arbitrarily relied on immigration-related factors that Congress did not authorize it to rely on in allocating federal grant monies to support victims.”
Rhode Island’s attorney general, Peter Neronha, said during the press conference that the Department of Justice’s new rules go against his values. He gave the example of a child who’s the victim of sexual assault being interviewed at a child advocacy center. “One question that should not be asked is whether that child is in this country lawfully or unlawfully,” he said.
The crime act fund was signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1984. The law emerged after a report from Reagan’s 1982 Task Force on Victims of Crime said that the “neglect of crime victims is a national disgrace,” according to Monday’s lawsuit. Among the report’s recommendations was to “enact legislation to provide federal funding to assist state crime victim compensation programs.”
In May, California filed two other lawsuits against the Trump administration for tying immigration enforcement to transportation and counter-terrorism funding, affecting billions of dollars in federal support.
Cayla Mihalovich is a California Local News fellow.
