The Justice Department is linking public safety money to immigration enforcement

The Justice Department is offering nearly $1 billion in federal public safety grants for cities and police departments across the country. But the grants, announced this month, come with a catch: Local officials have to be willing to work with federal immigration officers.

The move is part of a larger push from the Trump administration to entice cities and their police forces to work more closely with federal immigration officers, a shift officials at the DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security have been quietly making in the aftermath of the highly visible — and highly unpopular — immigration enforcement surges in cities like Minneapolis and Chicago in recent months.

"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," says Tahir Duckett, executive director of the Center for Innovations in Community Safety at Georgetown Law.

About $700 million of the grant money comes from the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services within the DOJ. These funding opportunities, known as COPS grants, have existed since 1994. Historically, they are one of the largest sources of federal funding for local police. In the last three decades, COPS grants have sent more than $20 billion to cities across the country.

Much of that money has traditionally gone toward hiring new police officers, but it can also support school safety programs, mental health services for police officers and other initiatives.

A second set of funds, called the Model Cities Initiative, is new and comes from last year's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, President Trump's massive tax and spending law. That grant money, once awarded, can be used for things like increasing police presence in high crime areas or purchasing new technology, like drones and AI. It will amount to about $300 million and will be awarded to two to four midsize cities.

"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. Typically, a team of reviewers, which sometimes includes subject matter experts outside the DOJ, evaluates the grant applications that meet the eligibility basic minimum requirements.

For the Model Cities Initiative, the DOJ says agency leadership will review each application and publish a list of finalists who will be invited to make a presentation to agency leadership.

"The strongest applications will not come from one office or one representative acting alone. They will come from jurisdictions that offer true partnership," acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a recent video statement about the Model Cities Initiative.

What "true partnership" entails becomes clearer in the fine print.

In the grant materials for the Model Cities Initiative, the DOJ says any program or activity that "impedes or hinders" the enforcement of federal immigration law, including by failing to honor DHS requests, will not be funded.

In announcing the new batch of COPS grants, the DOJ included a similar stipulation, indicating that "priority consideration" will be given to cities and counties that cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.

Insha Rahman, president and director of the Vera Institute of Justice, a criminal justice reform nonprofit, says the grant language may signal to Democratic-led cities that they need not apply.

"What's the end result? The only cities and localities that apply are Republican-led cities," Rahman says. "Then on the campaign trail in the midterms, the Trump administration can say, 'Look, Republicans take crime seriously. They're tough on crime. These Democrats are soft on crime. They want to defund the police. So they're not applying for these grants.'"

It is not unusual for federal grant money to be tied to a political agenda. During the Obama administration, for instance, the DOJ gave additional consideration to agencies that said they wanted to build trust in their communities. That was just a few years after the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. During President Joe Biden's years in office, priority was given to cities that used community approaches to violence intervention.

The first Trump administration also linked some grants to immigration enforcement, though that was challenged in court and ultimately revoked by the Biden administration.

Some criminal justice experts say the reattempt to forge a link between federal immigration enforcement and local policing is troubling, especially because experts say there's no clear link between immigration and public safety. Studies show immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than their citizen counterparts.

Immigration enforcement has typically been the job of the federal government, not local law enforcement, and many police chiefs insist there's good reason for that. They say working with immigration authorities erodes community trust in local policing and makes people less likely to call 911 or cooperate as witnesses in police investigations.

The Justice Department declined an interview on the grant funding. Initially, it directed NPR to DHS, which is also offering large funding incentives for local police doing immigration work

DHS told NPR in a statement that refusing to work with ICE is "misguided" and that when local police don't work with them, federal officers have to have a "more visible presence" in communities.

Later, the DOJ sent its own statement to NPR saying the suggestion that immigration is not related to public safety is "ludicrous" and that ICE has arrested "hundreds of thousands of criminal illegal aliens across all 50 states, including terrorists, murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and gang members."

Recent data shows more than 70% of immigrant detainees have no criminal convictions.
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