Attorneys general from 24 states and the governor of Kentucky filed a joint brief on Friday, November 6, 2026, backing local governments that are fighting election-related conditions the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) attached to federal counterterrorism grants. The amicus brief, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in the case Nashville v. DHS, asks the appeals court to deny FEMA's request for a stay — a ruling that would let the agency enforce the disputed conditions while its appeal proceeds.

Source: California Attorney General's Office

The case reached the appeals court after six local governments in Republican-led states won at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where the lower court found the election conditions unlawful and ordered the Trump administration not to enforce them. FEMA, which administers the grants alongside the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), appealed that judgment and asked the D.C. Circuit to stay it. California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul co-led Friday's brief; Maryland Attorney General Anthony G. Brown was among those who joined it.

Source: Maryland Attorney General's Office

The conditions at issue

According to the attorneys general, the challenged conditions would require state election officials to use DHS's Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database to verify the citizenship of every registered voter in state voter databases, and would require states to adopt hand-marked paper ballots to receive Homeland Security Grant Program (HSGP) funds. Maryland's Attorney General said the conditions would also force states and local election authorities to abandon hundreds of millions of dollars and years of investments in modernizing voting equipment and transition to paper-ballot-only systems, threatening the accuracy and accessibility of the vote. Both Bonta and Brown described the SAVE database, in their offices' words, as inaccurate and faulty.

In the brief, the coalition argues that FEMA's attempt to condition homeland security funding in this way would undermine the states' constitutional entitlement to regulate federal elections, and would be exorbitantly expensive to implement and would impair the administration of elections. Maryland's release makes the constitutional point in full: the Constitution grants states the authority to administer federal elections, subject only to regulation by Congress — and, the release notes, Congress has repeatedly rejected bills favored by the Trump administration that would impose similar requirements on the states, so the administration has instead leveraged state funding to advance its priorities.

What the attorneys general said

"The Trump Administration is once again making the safety of our communities collateral damage in its partisan agenda," said Attorney General Bonta. "Time and time again, this administration has tried to weaponize critical federal funding to force states into submission, and time and time again, the courts have rejected these unlawful power grabs. Counterterrorism funding exists to protect our communities from real threats, not to advance baseless election conspiracy theories. The safety of our communities is not a bargaining chip, which is why I urge the D.C. Circuit to deny the request to stay the district court ruling."

"States cannot be forced to surrender their constitutional authority to run their own elections just because the President disagrees with how they administer them," said Maryland Attorney General Brown. "Maryland stands with the local governments challenging the Trump Administration's unlawful attempt to withhold counterterrorism resources to advance its political agenda."

Money created after 9/11

Congress established the Homeland Security Grant Program in direct response to the September 11, 2001 attacks, to help states and local governments prevent, prepare for, protect against and respond to acts of terrorism. California and its cities receive $150 million in HSGP funding each year for those purposes, and Maryland receives more than $10 million a year, which its Attorney General says supports the state's efforts to protect residents from terrorism and cyberattacks. Bonta's office says that over the last 18 months FEMA has made aggressive and unprecedented efforts to use hundreds of millions of dollars appropriated for HSGP — and other federal grant programs — to extract unrelated policy changes from the states, and that Bonta has successfully challenged similar attempts to impose immigration conditions on transportation, homeland security and Victims of Crime Act funding.

A second lawsuit is running in parallel

Friday's amicus brief is not the states' only case on these conditions. In July 2026, Bonta, Brown and a coalition of attorneys general filed a separate lawsuit challenging the same conditions and others attached to this funding. Brown's office says the coalition filed that lawsuit after successfully defending the same grants from unlawful conditions in 2025. The local governments' case, Nashville v. DHS, is the one now before the D.C. Circuit, and the states are participating in it as friends of the court rather than as parties.

Why it matters for immigrant voters

The SAVE citizenship-check condition is the part of the dispute that reaches ordinary voters most directly, including naturalized citizens — a group that includes many Punjabi-American voters who became U.S. citizens after immigrating. Under the challenged conditions, state officials would have to run every registered voter in their databases through a federal citizenship-verification system that two attorneys general publicly describe as faulty and inaccurate. The coalition's position is that a database error should not be allowed to put an eligible voter's registration at risk, and that decisions about how federal elections are run belong to the states and to Congress — not to a grant condition written by a federal agency.

What happens next

The D.C. Circuit will first decide FEMA's stay request. If the court denies the stay, the district court's order blocking the conditions stays in force while the appeal is argued. If the court grants the stay, FEMA could enforce the election conditions during the appeal. After the stay decision, the appeal itself will proceed on the merits, and the attorneys general's separate July 2026 lawsuit over the same conditions continues in parallel.