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By Hannah Parry and Dan Gooding
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A U.S. District Court judge on Wednesday blocked the Trump administration from seizing $34 million in anti-terrorism funding for New York City's transportation system.
New York Attorney General Letitia James sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Tuesday, accusing the administration of slashing the funds because of New York's sanctuary city policies.
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said Wednesday that he agreed New York will “quite likely” be able to prove the funds were diverted because the Trump administration wanted to punish the state and granted the temporary restraining order.
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He also noted that the grant program had been allocated on terrorism risk.
“Obviously, New York is no stranger to risks of terrorist attacks and it’s not just 9/11 that tells us that,” the judge said before recounting numerous attacks in the city since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six people and injured more than 1,000 others," he wrote.
Newsweek reached out to DHS for comment via email on Wednesday evening.
Why It Matters
Kaplan had also issued a ruling on the potential loss of FEMA emergency preparedness funding for Democrat states, including New York, on Tuesday. Wednesday's ruling came on the same day the Trump administration froze federal funding for two major infrastructure projects in the city, including an extension to a subway line.
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What To Know
The state sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on Tuesday, noting that the September 11, 2001, terror attacks led to the creation of the Rail and Transit Security Grant Program to protect transit systems from chemical, biological, radiological and explosives threats.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, said Tuesday that DHS's decision to cut almost $34 million in funding was "an unlawful decision apparently designed to punish New York" over its sanctuary immigration policies.
The city’s transit system isn’t the only agency facing cuts. The Trump administration slashed federal counterterrorism funding for the New York Police Department from $90 million to nearly $10 million, a move that Commissioner Jessica Tisch on Wednesday called “profoundly bad news.”
In granting a temporary restraining order, Kaplan noted that the grant program was created with instructions to allocate funds solely on the basis of terrorism risk. He also noted that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, described as the architect of the Sept. 11 attacks, was to be tried in New York until “enough pressure from Congress and the city’s administration” got the decision overturned.
“And he’s still in Guantanamo years later with no end to a trial in sight. Why did that happen? It happened because of an acute fear of terrorism attacks,” Kaplan said.
The judge said it was “reasonably likely, quite likely” that the city of New York will prove the Trump administration withdrew the money because it decided “New York should be punished for exercising its responsibilities in a way that does not satisfy the administration in what it calls the largest deportation mission in history.”
At an afternoon news conference before the ruling, Tisch warned that it was a “profound mistake” to take anti-terrorism funding away from “the No. 1 terrorist target in the world.”
Besides the attacks on the World Trade Center, Kaplan said the city has faced scores of attacks since 9/11, including one where a man severely burned himself trying to set off a pipe bomb in the Times Square subway station in 2017, as well as when two pressure-cooker-type devices were found at the Fulton Street subway station in lower Manhattan in 2019, triggering an evacuation and affecting thousands of commuters.
The judge also mentioned a Halloween 2017 attack in which a man in a truck killed eight people on a bicycle path in Manhattan and the 2022 shooting on a subway train in Brooklyn in which a man wounded 10 passengers with gunfire.
The judge said he expressed no view on the administration's deportation program and believed a lawyer for the federal government was mistaken when he claimed that a temporary restraining order was premature because funds had not yet been dispersed on what was the first day of the new budget year.
What people Are Saying
New York Attorney General Letitia James, in a press release Tuesday: “New Yorkers lived through the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history, and we know what is at stake here. Congress created this program after 9/11 to protect millions of daily riders. I am asking the court to act before midnight to stop these funds from vanishing and to ensure that New Yorkers are not put at risk by this administration’s political games.”
New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, speaking Wednesday: “Cutting these resources now, in a time of global conflict and surging threats, puts lives at risk and will make our city meaningfully less safe. To be blunt, this is the difference between a city that prevents the next attack and a city left exposed to it."
What's Next
The Trump administration has until October 6 to file a response to the court, with a hearing scheduled for October 9, 2025.
Reporting by The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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