CHICAGO – Attorney General Kwame Raoul co-led a coalition of 25 states opposing the Trump administration’s efforts to coerce states and local governments into advancing its priorities for administering future elections by withholding crucial counterterrorism funding.
Raoul 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 and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to impose unlawful conditions on Homeland Security Grant Program (HSGP) funding. Illinois receives more than $40 million in HSGP funding each year, which supports the state’s efforts to protect residents from terrorism, cyberattacks and major emergencies. The funding supports state bomb squads, including the Illinois State Police’s Statewide Weapons of Mass Destruction Team; police, fire, emergency services, and public works mutual aid organizations that mobilize first responders across jurisdictions to respond to major emergencies; statewide information-sharing networks; training for first responders on responding to terrorist attacks and other disasters, and more.
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“Congress and individual states – not the president – have the authority to oversee the elections process. Cities and counties have administered federal elections pursuant to state law since the early years of our nation,” Raoul said. “These conditions are unlawful and unnecessary, as Illinois and other states just demonstrated this week by administering safe and secure midterm elections. I stand with my fellow attorneys general and these local governments against the Trump administration’s illegal and dangerous attempts to coerce compliance with the president’s political agenda. We ask the court not to allow these conditions to go into effect.”
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. Raoul and the coalition are asking the appeals court to deny the stay.
In July, Raoul co-led a coalition of attorneys general in filing a separate legal challenge to the unlawful conditions that the administration is attempting to impose on this funding. Raoul filed that lawsuit after co-leading a coalition that successfully defended the same category of funding from unlawful conditions in 2025.
Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul co-led the coalition with California Attorney General Rob Bonta. Joining them 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, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin, along with the governor of Kentucky.
