Attorney General Clark Supports Legal Challenge to Trump’s Unlawful Conditions on Federal Counterterrorism Funding

Attorney General Charity Clark joined a coalition of 24 other states and territories opposing the Trump administration's efforts to coerce states and local governments into advancing its elections administration priorities by withholding crucial counterterrorism funding.

Attorney General Clark and the coalition filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in support of a group of local governments challenging decisions by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to impose unlawful conditions on Homeland Security Grant Program (HSGP) funding.

The challenged conditions would require state election officials to use DHS' faulty Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database to verify the citizenship of every registered voter in states' voter databases. They would also force states and local election authorities to discard hundreds of millions of dollars in voting equipment and transition to paper-ballot systems.

The lower court found the election conditions were unlawful and ordered the Trump administration not to impose them, but the administration is now seeking a stay of that order while it appeals the lower court's decision. Attorney General Clark and the coalition are asking the appeals court to deny the stay.

In July, Attorney General Clark and a coalition of attorneys general filed a separate legal challenge to the unlawful conditions that the administration is attempting to impose on this funding. The coalition filed that lawsuit after successfully defending the same category of funding from unlawful conditions in 2025.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul co-led the coalition. Joining them and Attorney General Clark in filing the amicus brief are the attorneys general of Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin, along with the governor of Kentucky.