Immigration, DEI Issues, Threaten Billions In Grants

By Jim Mathews / President & CEO

U.S. DOT Secretary Sean Duffy warned Federal grant recipients this week that they risk losing funding if they don’t cooperate with new priorities aimed at immigration enforcement and erasing diversity-equity-inclusion (DEI), a warning which could set the stage to yank billions of dollars in funding for important rail projects in at least eight states.

California, New York, Illinois, Connecticut, and Massachusetts – together, recipients of more than $10 billion in rail and transit grants – each have laws, court rulings, or administration policies limiting cooperation with Federal immigration enforcement efforts.

About ten years ago North Carolina barred local entities from hindering Federal immigration enforcement, although some individual communities in the state unofficially limit cooperation anyway. Between existing rail grants and seven proposed Corridor ID development efforts, that state has some $450 million on the line.

Similarly and ironically, despite a statewide mandate in Louisiana to cooperate with Federal immigration enforcement, New Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office has been operating under a Federal consent decree for the past 12 years restricting compliance with “ICE detainers.”

These are written requests from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE for short, that ask a local jail or law enforcement agency to hold on to an individual for additional 48 hours beyond their release date and time while ICE decides whether to take that person into custody to put them into the Federal deportation system. The consent decree bars New Orleans from complying with these detainers unless the detained person is charged with specific serious crimes. The New Orleans-Baton Rouge Passenger Rail effort entered into the Corridor ID program in 2023, with a $500,000 Phase 1 grant.

And in Florida, where the state has had extremely strict anti-sanctuary laws on the books since 2019 and where two significant FRA Fed-State Partnership grants are pending to help build Brightline’s planned Cocoa and Stuart stations, local communities have at times pushed back against the state. Fort Meyers’ City Council, for example, turned down an agreement with ICE. That rejection provoked a quick rebuke from Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier.

"DOT has noted reported instances where some recipients of federal financial assistance have declined to cooperate with ICE investigations, have issued driver’s licenses to individuals present in the United States in violation of federal immigration law, or have otherwise acted in a manner that impedes federal law enforcement," Duffy’s letter says. "Such actions undermine federal sovereignty in the enforcement of immigration law, compromise the safety and security of the transportation systems supported by DOT financial assistance, and prioritize illegal aliens over the safety and welfare of the American people whose Federal taxes fund DOT’s financial assistance programs.”

But even as Duffy issued his “Follow The Law” letter yesterday to transportation-grant recipients, a U.S. Federal judge ruled on the very same day that only Congress can impose or remove restrictions on Federal funds, temporarily blocking a Trump Administration executive order (EO 14,159) that directs every Federal agency to ensure that Federal payments do not “by design or effect...abet so-called ‘sanctuary’ policies that seek to shield illegal aliens from deportation.” The judge was ruling on an unrelated suit brought by 16 so-called “sanctuary cities” led by the City and County of San Francisco, but the language of the ruling could be read as broad enough to halt, at least for now, any action on rail grants.

The big Gateway Tunnel Project to repair and rehabilitate the tubes connecting New Jersey and New York, the beating heart of the Northeast Corridor, alone has some $12 billion in Federal money at stake. Last year, the Federal Transit Administration executed a $6.88 billion Full Funding Grant Agreement for Gateway under its Capital Investment Grants (CIG) program, on top of $3.8 billion in 2023 grants for additional construction phases. There’s $292 million for early construction work to complete the Hudson Yards “tunnel box” in Manhattan, and DOT’s Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing, or RRIF, program holds $4.1 billion in low-interest loans earmarked for the project.

New York State is not, itself, a "sanctuary state," but New York City has adopted policies limiting ICE cooperation, particularly in honoring detainer requests. And the state attorney general's office earlier this year issued statewide guidance noting that undocumented status is a civil violation and not a criminal offense, instructing schools and law enforcement agencies to wait for a warrant from a judge before assisting with immigration-related arrests or detentions.

Connecticut got $11.6 million in January for Hartford Line improvements to add weekday roundtrips between New Haven and Springfield, and there’s also more than $16 million for other safety upgrades and expansions. In Massachusetts, there’s $36.8 million that was awarded last October to upgrade tracks, signals, and other infrastructure around Springfield Union Station as part of the East-West Rail project.