The city of Denver, along with the city of Chicago and Pima County, Ariz., are suing the Trump administration over the cancellation of federal grants for the local governments.
The legal fight is focused on a federal program meant to help cities like Denver pay for the cost of sheltering immigrants. The lawsuit was set to be filed Friday morning in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
Last month, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said that it wouldn’t be sending about $24 million in reimbursements that the city of Denver was expecting. The city spent that money in 2023 and 2024 on emergency shelters to house tens of thousands of recent immigrants.
“That's $24 million that the city worked to procure — for a crisis that it did not create — that it will not be getting,” said Jon Ewing, a spokesperson for Mayor Mike Johnston, in an interview last month.
FEMA never accused Denver of violating the terms of the grant. Instead, it said that the spending “is not consistent with (the federal Department of Homeland Security’s) current priorities.” The Trump administration doesn’t support spending money to assist immigrants without legal status, FEMA said.
The money to Denver, Chicago and Pima County came through the Shelter and Services Program, which was funded by Congress and administered by FEMA.
“The need for the SSP program was and is clear,” the mayor’s office said in a press release this week. “Denver responded to this crisis – that we neither created nor asked for – to prevent thousands of families from living on our streets in the cold, maintain public safety, and ensure the city continued to run smoothly.”
The wave of immigration to Dener was caused in part by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who spent more than $200 million on buses to transport roughly 120,000 immigrants to Denver and other cities.
“Denver, Chicago, and Pima County assert that the federal government’s actions are unconstitutional, as these actions attempt to override Congress’ constitutional authority to appropriate funds. Additionally, the jurisdictions assert that the federal government violated the Administrative Procedure Act by failing to provide a reasoned basis for their actions,” the press release stated.
