Lawsuit revealed DOJ conditioned FY2025 COPS policing grants on anti-DEI and immigration-cooperation certifications

On October 28, 2025, the City and County of San Francisco, Santa Clara County, and the City of Tucson sued the U.S. Department of Justice and Attorney General Pamela Bondi in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, arguing the conditions exceeded the authority Congress delegated to DOJ under the COPS statute, violated the separation of powers and the Spending Clause, and were adopted without the reasoned explanation the Administrative Procedure Act requires. The plaintiffs argued the underlying COPS statute in fact encourages, rather than restricts, agencies' recruitment of minority and female officers. The City of San Diego joined as a plaintiff the following week.

Since the mid-1990s, Congress has appropriated more than $21 billion to the Justice Department's Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) to fund local law-enforcement hiring, training, and community-policing programs. In a Notice of Funding Opportunity published May 8, 2025 for the fiscal year 2025 COPS Hiring Program, DOJ barred grant funds from being used for any program that provides or advances "diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility" or environmental-justice programs or activities, and gave applicants "additional consideration" for cooperating with federal civil immigration enforcement under an "Ending Deadly Sanctuary City Policies" criterion.

When DOJ issued the FY2025 COPS grant awards in October 2025, it attached three specific conditions recipients had to accept to receive their funding: an "Immigration Condition" requiring cities to share citizenship and immigration-status information with the Department of Homeland Security on request; a "Discrimination Condition" requiring cities to certify they do not operate any program, including one with diversity-, equity-, or inclusion-related components, that DOJ deems to violate federal civil-rights or antidiscrimination law; and an "Executive Order Condition" requiring cities to certify compliance with all federal laws and all presidential executive orders and memoranda, including ones the President had not yet issued.

Updates

2025-11-12 — Chicago and St. Paul filed a parallel lawsuit over the same conditions [3]

The City of Chicago and the City of St. Paul, Minnesota sued DOJ and the COPS office in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois over the same three conditions attached to their own FY2025 COPS awards — a $6.25 million grant to Chicago for 50 police-officer hires and a smaller award to St. Paul for its downtown homelessness initiative — adding a Tenth Amendment claim that the Immigration Condition unconstitutionally commandeered city employees into federal civil immigration enforcement.

2026-01-15 — Illinois federal court granted Chicago and St. Paul a preliminary injunction [3]

U.S. District Judge Jorge L. Alonso granted the cities' motion for a preliminary injunction and stay of agency action, blocking DOJ from enforcing the three conditions against Chicago and St. Paul while the case proceeds.

2026-01-21 — California federal court granted San Francisco a preliminary injunction [2]

U.S. District Judge James Donato granted the California plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction, finding the challenged conditions likely exceeded DOJ's statutory authority because the COPS Act itself encourages recruiting minority and female officers, and that the cities would suffer irreparable harm from losing the funding. The injunction preserved the plaintiffs' access to the grant funds without complying with the contested conditions while the litigation, including cross-motions for summary judgment, continues.