Twenty-five states and Washington, D.C., are suing the Trump administration for trying to use federal emergency grant funding to control state election rules.
The Department of Homeland Security has threatened to withhold 20% of Federal Emergency Management Agency homeland security funding from any state that doesn’t adopt strict new election procedures preferred by President Donald Trump.
Those rules from DHS include using hand-marked paper ballots instead of machines, the implementation of the SAVE database to search for registered voters who could be noncitizens, and handing the federal government information about state voter rolls.
“The conditions DHS is trying to impose would require states to make sweeping changes to the way we conduct elections, including rewriting state election laws and privacy laws,” Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul said in a news conference with the attorneys generals for Rhode Island, California and New Jersey, the four states leading the lawsuit.
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The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Rhode Island, asks a judge to block implementation of the conditions, arguing in part that DHS overstepped Congress’ role and violated the regulatory process.
State coalitions have already twice sued the Trump administration over its attempts to withhold FEMA disaster funding from states that do not cooperate with new Trump administration immigration policies. In both cases, courts granted summary judgment to the states and forced the release of funds.
“I am disappointed, but not necessarily surprised, that our coalition is filing its third lawsuit today to protect this funding,” Raoul said.
DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
States, not the federal government, have central authority over their election rules. Imposing requirements on the distribution of federal disaster preparation funding is the latest strategy from the Trump administration to try to get around that limitation. Many states rely heavily on FEMA’s Homeland Security Grant Program to invest in law enforcement and plan for and protect against terrorist threats.
The SAVE database was originally created by DHS to check the citizenship status of people applying for government benefit programs.
But since 2024, Republicans in Congress have been trying to pass versions of the SAVE Act, the most recent iteration of which would force states to use the database to cut people from their voter rolls. The 2026 version of the bill is currently stalled in the Senate.
Election experts have repeatedly warned that implementing the SAVE database for voter roll checks could lead to accidentally disenfranchising people who are eligible to vote.
With the legislation stalled in Congress, DHS is instead trying to use grant funding to force states to implement SAVE.
“We’re back in court to ensure that these funds are distributed as Congress intended, not conditioned on an unlawful political agenda,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in the news conference. “Public safety should never become a bargaining chip.”
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