Donald Trump leaving the West Wing of the White House, Monday, April 7, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein).
Two sanctuary cities in Massachusetts are asking a federal court to bar the Trump administration from cutting their federal funding.
President Donald Trump during his second term has signed multiple executive orders signaling his administration’s plan to identify and penalize sanctuary cities, aiming to involve these cities in the process of deporting large numbers of immigrants. As a response, government agencies have released various guidelines to carry out the directives of the 45th and 47th presidents.
While numerous jurisdictions have moved quickly to declare they are not cooperating with the lists created by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the cities of Chelsea and Somerville have openly embraced the concept of being a sanctuary city and a welcoming city, titles they adopted in 2007 and 1987, respectively.
Recently, Chelsea and Somerville presented a motion along with a detailed 42-page legal document to U.S. District Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton, appointed by George H.W. Bush, requesting a temporary restraining order against the Trump administration to prevent the enforcement of what they believe to be illegal Executive Orders and Agency Directives.
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The cities say they have policy choices “that limit their participation in federal immigration enforcement efforts” and explain that these choices are based on “[p]ublic safety considerations” at their core.
“As self-governing cities under the Massachusetts Constitution, Chelsea and Somerville are permitted to make this policy choice, and the United States Constitution protects them from attempts by the federal government to coerce them into assisting with federal immigration enforcement,” the memorandum reads. “Yet this is precisely what Defendants — President Donald J. Trump and other federal officials — are doing. These efforts have become increasingly aggressive over the last four months and now pose an imminent threat to Plaintiffs’ ability to govern and serve their residents. Plaintiffs now ask for this Court’s intervention to preliminarily enjoin Defendants’ unconstitutional campaign to undermine the authority of local governments to make these purely local decisions.”
While the president’s orders were issued in January, February and April — and the 46-page complaint was filed in February — a recent DHS directive led the cities to ask the court for injunctive relief.
On May 29, DHS published a list of jurisdictions, including Chelsea and Somerville, which allegedly “obstruct the enforcement of Federal immigration laws.” The directive also warns such jurisdictions to “immediately review and revise their policies” or face consequences.
After a backlash from several cities upset about their inclusion, and law enforcement agencies confused about the list, DHS backtracked and removed the webpage hosting the list.
The plaintiffs, however, say the funding threat remains — and has increased with each successive agency issuing directives purporting to bring their policies in line with Trump’s orders.
“Each of these directives is more than mere guidance or suggestion — they are commands (e.g., ‘shall’) to disfavor and defund jurisdictions based on federal immigration policies that are wholly unrelated to the funding at issue,” the memo continues. “These actions are actualizing the Administration’s campaign promises and turning them into swift action against sanctuary jurisdictions.”
And, they say, the threat, much less the realized cessation of congressionally-approved federal funding, is unconstitutional.
“Defendants’ illegal attack on sanctuary cities blatantly violates the Constitution,” the motion continues. “Specifically, by attempting to unilaterally withhold Congressionally allocated funds, the Executive Orders and Agency Directives violate core Separation of Powers principles.”
The plaintiffs note these developments — and the limited nature of that earlier injunction — in their Tuesday memo.
“One federal court has already preliminarily enjoined a number of the challenged actions, but its ruling is limited to the sixteen plaintiff-jurisdictions that brought that action,” the memo goes on. “Chelsea and Somerville now ask this Court for similar relief: a preliminary injunction to immediately enjoin Defendants from implementing or enforcing the Executive Orders, the Agency Directives, or any other materially similar directive to withhold, condition, or freeze federal funds to ‘sanctuary jurisdictions.’ The harms to Plaintiffs from this unconstitutional campaign are mounting daily and will only increase in number, further damaging Plaintiffs and their communities, unless Defendants are enjoined by this Court.”
In their memo, the plaintiffs argue the funding threat is particularly misplaced because the cities do not receive any federal funding related to immigration.
Chelsea and Somerville explain this point at length:
[Trump’s] Executive Orders threaten to remove all federal funding from those jurisdictions that do not meet his unilaterally imposed conditions. For Plaintiffs, this is an enormous financial threat: in its last full fiscal year, Chelsea received over $14 million in federal funding, and Somerville received close to $20 million. This federal funding supports a wide variety of critical services and projects for the cities’ residents, including housing rehabilitation, food delivery to elderly residents, roadway safety projects, educational services, and more — none of which has any connection to federal immigration enforcement.
Also similar to his strategy in other contexts, Defendant Trump is adopting a “whole-of-government” approach to bringing Chelsea and Somerville to their knees, with numerous executive agencies acting quickly to implement his Executive Orders. For example, the Department of Transportation has issued an order prioritizing funding for projects that require local “compliance or cooperation with Federal immigration enforcement,” and is now mandating that funding recipients certify compliance with these terms to remain eligible for funding. Somerville now faces the choice of signing such an agreement or losing a nearly $4 million grant award for roadway safety which, again, has nothing to do with federal immigration enforcement…
[T]hese new conditions are forcing Plaintiffs to bend to the Administration’s will via coerced compliance with the immigration-related conditions or lose millions in funding that they have already been awarded…
“Even if Congress had imposed the conditions the Executive Branch now seeks to impose — which it has not — the conditions would still violate the Spending Clause because, inter alia, they are unrelated to the federal interest in the programs at issue and are unduly coercive,” the cities argue.
The cities argued Trump’s executive orders and the concomitant agency directives violate several aspects of the U.S. Constitution, including the separation of powers, the spending clause, the 10th Amendment and the Fifth Amendment, as well as the Administrative Procedure Act — the federal statute governing agency actions.
For Chelsea and Somerville, the heart of the matter is local control for local residents who, for decades, have decided at the ballot box how they want their public safety agencies to work in their cities.
“Our residents know that our community is safer when police focus on preventing crime rather than raiding the local sandwich shop,” Somerville Mayor Katjana Ballantyne said in a statement. “We know that stripping cities of their rights, erodes everyone’s rights. We know that spreading hate and lies about an entire group of people has historically led to harm and injustice for all. And we know that withholding federal funding for no good reason threatens the health and safety of all residents.”
