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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
January 14, 2026 |
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LANSING – Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a motion to dismiss its appeal of the final judgment permanently blocking the Trump Administration’s effort to unlawfully impose immigration enforcement requirements on billions of dollars in annual U.S. Department of Transportation grants. By dropping its appeal, the Trump Administration concedes the case, fully resolving it in favor of Michigan and the 21 other states that sued the Administration, announced Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel.
“The Trump Administration has repeatedly tried to illegally condition essential federal funds, our own tax dollars that come back to the states by these programs enacted by Congress, by tying them to its own political agenda,” said Nessel. “And the courts have ordered them to stand down time and again.”
Michigan receives hundreds of millions of dollars in grant funding from the Department of Transportation to build and maintain vital travel infrastructure like the roads, highways, airways, and bridges that connect communities and carry their residents to their workplaces and homes. This includes the funding necessary to prevent fatal traffic accidents and stop drunk drivers; the funding to provide transit for seniors and those with disabilities; and the funding that protects and restores roads after environmental disasters like fires or flooding. Neither the purpose of these grants, nor their grant criteria, are in any way connected to immigration enforcement.
Despite the constraints imposed by Congress and the Constitution, the Trump Administration attempted to seize Congress’s power of the purse by imposing unlawful conditions on transportation grants. In doing so, the Trump Administration violated two key principles that underlie the American system of checks and balances: agencies in the Executive Branch cannot act contrary to the authority conferred on them by Congress, and the federal government cannot use the spending power to coerce states into adopting its preferred policies.
On November 4, 2025, the District Court issued final judgment in favor of Michigan and the states that challenged this unlawful conduct, issuing an order permanently enjoining the Trump Administration from unlawfully imposing the conditions and vacating the conditions across all U.S. Department of Transportation grants. In issuing its decision, the Court found that the Trump Administration has “blatantly overstepped their statutory authority, violated the APA, and transgressed well-settled constitutional limitations on federal funding conditions. The Constitution demands the Court set aside this lawless behavior.”
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