The Trump Administration scored yet another small but potentially momentous legal win, this one coming in early October with a federal judge in Boston ruling that the federal government should not be blocked from withholding grant funds from two Massachusetts cities, Chelsea and Somerville, over their refusal to comply with the administration’s anti-illegal immigration policies.
As background, figuring out how to push the sanctuary jurisdictions, whether they be cities like Chelsea and Somerville or whole states like California, into line has been a major challenge for the Trump Administration. So far, two of its more successful policies have been flooding the cities with ICE agents to arrest the illegals anyway, and threating to cut off funds unless the jurisdiction starts complying, which has already brought about some wins.
Most of the sanctuary jurisdictions, of course, insist that he cannot do so, as Chelsea and Somerville alleged in the recent case regarding the Trump Administration’s decision to withhold grant funding from them over their refusal to go along with his crackdown on illegal immigration.
Fortunately for Trump, U.S. District Court of Massachusetts Judge Nathaniel Gorton disagreed, writing in his hugely important decision that the two sanctuary cities had not managed to demonstrate that they would suffer “imminent and irreparable harm” if the preliminary injunction they were requesting wasn’t granted.
Particularly, Judge Gorton noted that, so far, only one grant had been cancelled and, though more could theoretically be cancelled at any point in the future, as the attorney for the cities argued in the hearing, that was so far entirely “speculative” and thus not worth a preliminary injunction.
And, noting that it is unclear what their losses even are, Judge Gorton wrote, “Plaintiffs necessarily face, with or without an injunction, budgetary uncertainty when bidding for competitive grants. The net loss to the Cities absent a preliminary injunction is, arguably, zero. A preliminary injunction would not eliminate the status quo uncertainty for the Cities.”
Predictably, the sanctuary cities involved totally freaked out over the idea that Trump would be able to cut their funding if they broke federal law, as they have been doing, declaring that Trump is holding “a gun to the head” with his threats that have put them in the “crosshairs.”
Such is what Lawyers for Civil Rights Litigation Director Oren Sellstrom, who represented the two Massachusetts cities, declared in the hearing over the funding cuts, whining, “The harm that would come if the cuts actually go into place is enormous. That is a gun to the head. That’s precisely the point of this campaign, to put jurisdictions, particularly smaller jurisdictions like Chelsea and Somerville, in the crosshairs.”
So far, the city of Somerville has lost $4 million in grant funding, out of a total of $19.4 million it received in 2024, and the city of Chelsea could reportedly lose up to $8.5 million out of the $14.5 million that it received from the federal government in 2024. So, in both cases, the consequences of the recent courtroom defeat, at least for now, are tremendous.
