States say Trump administration has backed off ICE cooperation requirement for victims’ funds

Several Democratic state attorneys general say the Trump administration has backed away from requiring states to agree to cooperate with the president’s immigration agenda in order to access federal money for programs that help victims of crime.

In a series of news releases Friday, several of the attorneys general announced that federal Victims of Crime Act money was being released, enabling the states to fund victim assistance grants to nonprofits as well as their state compensation programs that provide direct aid to victims of violent crime. Officials from 20 states and Washington, D.C., had signed on to a lawsuit filed in late August challenging the requirement.

The federal conditions placed on the funds threatened to cut money to a state or subgrantee if it refused to honor civil immigration enforcement requests, denies U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers access to facilities or fails to provide advance notice of release dates of people possibly wanted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement because of their immigration status.

New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin said in a statement that the U.S. Department of Justice, which overseas the crime victims funds, would remove the conditions that had been placed on applying for the money. Platkin’s office declined to comment on the status of the lawsuit, though it still appeared active on the court website Friday.

An automatic reply sent in response to an email to a spokesperson for the Office of Justice Programs Friday noted the office would not respond because of the federal shutdown.

“Faced with our lawsuit, the Trump Administration has abandoned its cruel attempt to impose illegal conditions on nearly $1.4 billion in funding that supports victims and survivors of crime as they navigate their trauma and work to get back on their feet,” Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell wrote in an e-mailed statement.

The lawsuit filed in late August had asked a federal judge to declare the conditions were an administrative overstep as well as unconstitutional.

Every state and territory has a victims compensation program that follows federal guidelines, but largely is set up under state law to provide financial help to crime victims, including medical expense reimbursement, paying for crime scene cleanup, counseling or helping with funeral costs for homicide victims. The federal Victims of Crime Act covers the cost of about 75% of state compensation program awards.

The funds are also used to pay for other services, including testing rape kits, funding grants to domestic violence recovery organizations, trauma recovery centers and more.

Advocates and others argue that the system needs to protect victims regardless of their immigration status and ensure that reporting a crime does not lead to deportation threats. They also say that marginalized communities, such as newly arrived immigrants, are more likely to be crime targets.

The same group of state attorneys general filed a similar joint lawsuit this week challenging a bar on using money for programs for crime victims and violence against women for services to people who are in the country illegally, contending the restrictions are unconstitutional, but also create an undue burden on service providers to determine the immigration status of victims and witnesses.