PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island — The federal government has violated a permanent court injunction for the second time by attaching immigration-related conditions to grants for disaster and emergency relief programs, a federal judge in Rhode Island said on Monday, November 9. Judge Mary S. McElroy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island held that the 2025 ruling blocking the government from requiring states to cooperate with immigration enforcement in order to receive Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) grant money also applies to fiscal year 2026 grants that contained virtually identical terms, Bloomberg Law reported.

Source: Bloomberg Law

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, whose office co-led the states' motion to enforce the judgment, announced the same decision on Monday in fuller detail. In his office's account, the court determined that the immigration conditions the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) imposed on fiscal year 2026 funding fall inside the scope of the prior judgment, which was written to cover future fiscal years and 'materially similar' conditions. The court declared that DHS's decision to implement the fiscal 2026 conditions violated the 2025 injunction, barred DHS from enforcing those conditions against the plaintiff states, and ordered DHS to reissue the award letters without the challenged conditions.

Source: California Attorney General's office

What the court actually ordered

The operative part of Monday's order is practical, not rhetorical. DHS cannot enforce the fiscal 2026 immigration conditions against the states that sued, and the grant award letters those states received — letters that carried the conditions — must be reissued clean. That matters because a state generally cannot draw down and spend grant money cleanly while its award letter carries conditions a court has already said are unlawful; the reissued letters are the paperwork that lets emergency managers, fire departments and police agencies in the plaintiff states use the money for the purposes Congress funded.

Attorney General Bonta was joined by the attorneys general of Illinois, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin, his office said. The list includes the states with some of the largest Punjabi diaspora populations in the country — California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois and Washington — whose local police, fire and emergency agencies are among the intended users of these grants.

How this fight reached a second violation finding

The case, State of Illinois v. FEMA in the District of Rhode Island, began in 2025 after DHS and FEMA attached immigration-cooperation conditions to grant programs that fund counterterrorism work, protection of high-risk urban areas, emergency preparedness and cybersecurity. On September 24, 2025, the Rhode Island court ruled that FEMA had violated the Constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act, calling the decisions 'arbitrary and capricious,' and issued a permanent injunction barring DHS from enforcing the conditions, according to the states' enforcement motion as reported by Smart Cities Dive. A follow-on injunction later that year barred the government from imposing any materially similar conditions.

This is not the first time the government has been told it crossed that line. In October 2025, the court found FEMA had violated the September order after the agency pursued a workaround, and this autumn the states went back to court again: in a motion reported on October 12, 2026, the coalition asked the court to enforce the injunction, saying DHS and FEMA had ignored it and imposed immigration-cooperation conditions — many of them identical to the fiscal 2025 conditions — on nine fiscal year 2026 grant programs covering nearly $1 billion in counterterrorism and emergency-management funds. In their filing, as reported at the time, the states quoted conditions that would bar restrictions on information-sharing between local law enforcement and federal immigration agents, require ICE access to people held in local custody, and require state officials not to leak or publicize the existence of an immigration enforcement operation. Monday's ruling is the court's answer to that enforcement motion: the fiscal 2026 terms are covered, the injunction was violated, and the letters must be reissued.

Why this matters beyond Rhode Island

California's Attorney General's office describes what is at stake in ordinary terms: the state receives DHS funding every year to prepare for, protect against, respond to and recover from terrorist attacks and other catastrophes — counterterrorism grants, grants to prepare for terrorism in high-concentration urban areas, emergency preparedness grants and cybersecurity grants — none of which, the office notes, is connected to civil immigration enforcement. State and local law enforcement already work closely with federal agencies on the counterterrorism measures these grants fund, the office added. For residents of the plaintiff states — including the Punjabi diaspora families concentrated in California's Central Valley, New York, New Jersey and Washington — the ruling means their local agencies do not have to trade disaster and counterterrorism readiness for cooperation with civil immigration enforcement in order to keep federal grant money flowing.

What happens next

The next step ordered by the court is administrative but concrete: DHS must reissue the fiscal year 2026 award letters to the plaintiff states without the challenged conditions, and it is barred from enforcing those conditions against them in the meantime. The order protects the states that sued; it does not, by its own terms as described in the Attorney General's release, rewrite grant terms for states that were not part of the case. Readers should expect the reissued letters — not another press release — to be the first visible sign that Monday's ruling is being implemented, and any government decision to appeal the enforcement order would be the next legal development to watch.