Arizona, 24 states sue Trump administration over disaster funding conditions

BOSTON (AZFamily/AP) — Arizona joined about half of U.S. states on Thursday in suing the Trump administration for requiring states to comply with election and immigration conditions to receive billions of dollars in federal funding for disasters.

The lawsuit by the attorneys general or governors of 25 states plus the District of Columbia, filed in Rhode Island and challenging Federal Emergency Management Agency and Department of Homeland Security policies, argued that the administration is requiring states to change their election systems and help DHS with immigration enforcement. The conditions would also allow DHS to terminate grants at any time and for any reason.

“Congress appropriated these funds to help protect our communities from terrorism, cyberattacks, and natural disasters—not to give the federal government leverage to force states to adopt unrelated political agendas,” Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said in an emailed statement. “The Trump administration cannot hold Arizona’s public safety funding hostage to coerce states into changing their election laws or diverting law enforcement resources away from the work that keeps our communities safe. We have successfully challenged these unlawful funding conditions before, and we are now going back to court to ensure Arizona receives the critical resources Congress intended and to defend the constitutional limits on federal power.”

The states argue putting conditions on congressionally appropriated funding violates the Administrative Procedure Act and the U.S. Constitution’s spending clause. Mayes joined two similar lawsuits that were both successful in 2025.

In a statement, a spokesperson for FEMA called the lawsuit an example of “partisan pushback” and said they expected “these left-wing politicians to oppose common-sense measures designed to protect election security and safeguard the integrity of American democracy.”

“Election security is national security, and protecting our critical infrastructure remains a top priority for the Trump Administration,” they said. “Concerns over voting processes, data security, and registration practices have made it clear that action is required.”

The lawsuit is one of scores that have challenged the Trump administration over its repeated efforts to browbeat mostly Democratic states into complying with its priorities to get billions of dollars in federal funding. The strategy has been used on everything from education funding to domestic violence grants to highway funding.

The courts have repeatedly found this strategy to be unlawful and unconstitutional. A ruling last year barred the administration from putting conditions on other FEMA funding, and a second ruling this year blocked the administration from redirecting DHS funding away from states not seen as supportive of its agenda.

“The States face losing billions of dollars in federal funding, are being put in a position of relinquishing their sovereign right to decide how to use their own police officers, are at risk of losing the trust built between local law enforcement and immigrant communities, and will have to scale back, reconsider, or cancel ongoing transportation projects,” U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. wrote last year, when he barred the Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy from cutting off transportation funds to states that did not comply with immigration enforcement actions.

The latest lawsuit argues the administration is attempting to apply some of the same conditions to 2026 funding, as it failed to do with funding last year.

Among the requirements being challenged in Thursday’s lawsuit is that states change their election systems. They must transition to paper-ballot systems, conduct a manual audit of voting systems, reconcile voters and verify the citizenship of every registered voter in the state’s voter databases.

If states fail to comply, they risk losing at least 20% of their Homeland Security Grant Program funding. That money is used to fund measures to protect citizens from cyberattacks and terrorism.

“The Trump Administration is holding critical funding for homeland security and disaster response hostage in their latest attempt to take over our elections and perpetuate baseless conspiracy theories,” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said in a statement.

Since his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden, Trump has groundlessly claimed mail-in voting is rife with fraud and has launched a federal investigation into that year’s vote, even though repeated audits and investigations, including ones run by Republicans, found it was free of widespread fraud. Trump also has said he wants to “take over” election administration in Democratic areas.

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