Donald Trump has revived his stalled push to cut federal funding for a number of Democratic-run states, announcing that any with a perceived “sanctuary city” status will not receive payments after 1 February.
The president made the statement during a freewheeling address at the Detroit Economic Club on Tuesday night, shortly after he gave the middle finger to a heckler at a Ford plant in the city.
“Starting February 1, we are not making any payments to sanctuary cities or states having sanctuary cities because they do everything possible to protect criminals at the expense of American citizens,” he said.
Critics immediately called the move “unconstitutional and immoral”. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), meanwhile, in a post on X, sought to justify Trump’s pronouncement by complaining that sanctuary jurisdictions “won’t let us in their jails to arrest the violent criminal illegal aliens in their custody”.
The post said: “As a result, DHS officers are forced to find the released criminal illegal aliens on the streets WITHOUT the support of local law enforcement … Sanctuary politicians are fighting for criminal illegal aliens. President Trump and [DHS] Secretary Noem are fighting for the victims of illegal alien crime.”
Trump’s previous efforts to use sanctuary cities, a loosely defined term for local jurisdictions that restrict cooperation with federal immigration authorities, as a tool to withhold money to political rivals have run into trouble.
In August, a district judge in San Francisco called the Trump administration’s push to deny funding to more than 30 cities “a coercive threat” and issued a preliminary injunction blocking it from doing so.
A federal appeals court is currently weighing Judge William Orrick’s ruling.
Trump’s comments in Detroit indicate a renewed approach to the policy by denying money not only to sanctuary cities themselves, but any state that contains one. A justice department list identifies 11 states and the District of Columbia, all under Democratic control, as places “that materially impede enforcement of federal immigration statutes and regulations”, as well as 18 cities and three counties.
“It breeds fraud and crime and all of the other problems that come, so we’re not making any payment to anybody that supports sanctuary cities,” Trump said.
Brandon Johnson, the Democratic mayor of Chicago, promised he would take legal action to fight the edict.
“President Trump’s announcement that he will attempt to cut off federal funds from Chicago for political reasons is blatantly unconstitutional and immoral,” he said in a statement.
“Those are funds that belong to the people of Chicago, not the president. Instead of investing in healthcare, education and jobs, this president is spending taxpayer dollars building up his personal militarized force in [Customs and Border Protection] and [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and enriching his corporate donors.
“Chicago will never back down from a fight. To the president, our message is simple: ‘We’ll see you in court.’”
Trump has escalated his financial assault on blue states in recent days and months, last week freezing more than $10bn in federal childcare and family assistance funds to California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York, all of which have Democratic governors.
The order by the Department of Health and Human Services, which cited alleged fraud for its decision, was blocked temporarily by a district court judge over the weekend.
In October, the Trump administration moved to cancel $7.6bn in grants to support clean energy in 16 states, all of which voted for the Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.
The terminations, district court judge Amit Mehta said on Monday in a 17-page order blocking the action, were “primarily – if not exclusively – based on whether the awardee resided in a state whose citizens voted for President Trump in 2024”.
Trump’s Detroit speech was intended to address the affordability crisis that threatens to weaken support for Republicans in a midterm election year. But as often happens when the president takes the podium, he veered off into numerous unrelated subjects.
He spent a portion of his remarks assailing the Somali community in the US, particularly in Minnesota, where a federal immigration shot and killed an unarmed US citizen last week, and where the FBI has spent weeks investigating alleged fraud in accessing federal programs.
Without expanding on details, Trump said he would “reverse [the] citizenship of any naturalized immigrant from Somalia or anywhere else who is convicted of defrauding our citizens”, an action legal experts say can only be taken against naturalized citizens for committing fraud during the naturalization process.
Earlier on Tuesday, the White House announced it was ending temporary protected status (TPS) for Somalis living in the US. According to government figures, only 705 Somali nationals were covered by TPS as of March 2025.
