Trump signed EO 14287, creating 'sanctuary jurisdiction' list and ordering agencies to identify federal grants for withholding

On April 28, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14287, "Protecting American Communities from Criminal Aliens," establishing a formal sanctuary jurisdiction designation-and-punishment mechanism across the entire federal government. The order directed the Attorney General and DHS Secretary to publish a list of states and localities that "obstruct the enforcement of Federal immigration laws," notify each listed jurisdiction with an opportunity to "come into compliance," and instruct all federal department heads to identify grants and contracts flowing to non-compliant jurisdictions "for suspension or termination." DOJ published the resulting sanctuary list on August 5, 2025, naming 13 states, 18 cities, and four counties.

The constitutional problem the order created was immediate: Congress holds the appropriations power, and conditions on federal grants must be enacted by Congress through statute. EO 14287 asserted that the executive branch could override or supplement those conditions unilaterally to penalize local governments for not adopting administration immigration-enforcement preferences — authority courts had already ruled did not exist. A federal court blocked the funding-withholding component within 11 days of signing, finding the EO could not be used as "an end run around" a preliminary injunction already in place against Trump's earlier sanctuary-city directives. The order also directed DOJ and DHS to develop mechanisms to verify immigrant eligibility in sanctuary jurisdictions to block federal public-benefit access, and DHS Secretary Noem separately used the enforcement pretext to threaten Harvard University's SEVP certification if it failed to produce immigration compliance records by April 30, 2025.

EO 14287 escalated the administration's sanctuary-city campaign from the January 2025 EO 14159 by adding a formal government-wide designation list and a funding-withholding mandate. The designation mechanism transformed executive immigration-enforcement preferences into a coercive financial penalty against local governments, bypassing the legislative conditions Congress wrote into the relevant grant statutes and asserting an appropriations power the Constitution assigns to the legislative branch.