Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

5. Department of Homeland Security · Notable

Condition FEMA grants on certified compliance with federal immigration law

Blocked

137 5. Department of Homeland Security

“The Secretary should direct FEMA to ensure that all FEMA-issued grant funding for states, localities, and private organizations is going to recipients who are lawful actors, can demonstrate that they are in compliance with federal law … Certification by applicants that they comply with all aspects of federal immigration laws, including the honoring of all immigration detainers.”

What has happened

  1. Blocked

    Still blocked, and the department has not withdrawn the term. The FY 2026 DHS Standard Terms and Conditions, effective 2026-04-16, carry the same certification clause word for word — the same 8 U.S.C. §§ 1373 and 1644 obligation, the same honoring of "requests for short term detention of an alien pursuant to a valid detainer", and the same requirement that "[t]he recipient must certify under penalty of perjury pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1746 … that it will comply with the requirements of this term" — published five months after the vacatur. So the mechanism the Quote asks for is in DHS's current department-wide grant terms while the orders above stand against it. The appeal (1st Cir. 25-2131, noticed 2025-11-21) is pending and **no stay has been sought or entered**, so the Status stays `blocked` rather than returning to `partial`.

  2. Blocked

    The department put the conditions back and the court took them out again. DHS had reinserted the contested conditions into the plaintiff States' award letters with the promise that "[i]f the injunction is stayed, vacated, or extinguished, the [contested conditions] will immediately become effective." Granting the States' motion to enforce, the court set the conditions aside under 5 U.S.C. § 706(2), ordered the defendants within seven days to "amend all award documents … to remove all 'Compliance with Federal Immigration Law' articles and reissue the amended award documents" and to strike the contingent-reinstatement sentence "or its material equivalents", and recorded that "[n]o part of the relief here ordered is inconsistent with or in any way more limited than the relief ordered on September 24, 2025."

  3. Blocked

    DHS and FEMA publicly attacked a district judge for halting the reallocation of $233 million in Homeland Security Grant Program funds. That reallocation is a separate ruling and not the certification this Quote asks for; the release is kept because it is the department's own contemporaneous account of its grant reforms being stopped in court, and because it dates the department's posture a week after the Rhode Island judgment.

  4. Blocked

    Vacated and enjoined. Granting the plaintiff States summary judgment and denying the government's cross-motion, Senior District Judge William E. Smith vacated and set aside the "contested conditions" — the terms requiring state and local recipients of DHS-overseen grants to assist in federal immigration enforcement — and permanently enjoined the defendants from enforcing them against the plaintiff States. Judgment entered the same day.

  5. Partially done

    The certification the Quote names exists, verbatim, and its date can be fixed by diffing the versions. Section IX of the FY 2025 DHS Standard Terms and Conditions, *Communication and Cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration Officials*, requires every recipient and subrecipient to agree that "(a) They must comply with the requirements of 8 U.S.C. §§ 1373 and 1644 … (c) That they will honor requests for cooperation, such as participation in joint operations, sharing of information, or **requests for short term detention of an alien pursuant to a valid detainer** … (d) That they will provide access to detainees … and (e) That they will not leak or otherwise publicize the existence of an immigration enforcement operation", and then: "**(2) The recipient must certify under penalty of perjury pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1746 and using a form that is acceptable to DHS, that it will comply with the requirements of this term**", with the same certification required of subrecipients and contractors, and compliance made "material to the Government's decision to make or continue with this award". Both limbs of the Quote — a certification of compliance with federal immigration law, and the honoring of immigration detainers — are met on the face of the department's own grant terms. Dated by diff: the clause and its certification requirement are absent from the FY2025 original (2024-10-22, zero hits for "immigration") and present in Version 2 of 2025-03-27, the first in-window edition. `partial` and not `done`: this is a mechanism in place, and no allowlisted source shows an award actually conditioned on a signed form.

  6. Attempted

    EO 14159 section 17 directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to "evaluate and undertake any lawful actions to ensure that so-called 'sanctuary' jurisdictions ... do not receive access to Federal funds". That is the directive behind the DHS grant conditions on immigration cooperation, and on this date it was a directive and nothing more: the department's own grant terms then in force, the FY2025 DHS Standard Terms and Conditions dated 2024-10-22, contain **no** occurrence of "immigration", no detainer clause and no certification requirement of any kind.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Reviewed 2026-09-03, on two questions, and between them they change the item twice. The first was what the grant documents say; the second, whether the conditions are currently enjoined. Both answers are joined up here.

Both documents can be read. https://www.fema.gov/grants/preparedness/homeland-security/fy-25-nofo carries the complete FY2025 Homeland Security Grant Program NOFO — 192,000 characters of prose — and https://www.dhs.gov/publication/dhs-standard-terms-and-conditions lists every edition back to FY2016 with dates and PDF links, all of which also open. Four editions were read and compared:

EditionDate“immigration”“certify under penalty”
FY2025 original2024-10-2200
FY2025 Version 22025-03-2781
FY2025 Version 32025-04-18101
FY20262026-04-16121

That comparison is what dates the event: the clause and its certification requirement arrive in the first in-window version.

  • The FEMA NOFO’s own Immigration Conditions section is weaker than the terms and points at them: “An immigration term and condition, including those in the DHS Standard Terms and Conditions, may be material to the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to make this grant award … No final agency determination has been made as of the date of this publication.” It is not the certification and is not cited as Evidence for it. What the NOFO does carry, as a distinct instrument, is a National Priority Area “Supporting Border Crisis Response and Enforcement” with a 10 percent minimum set-aside of total SHSP and UASI funds, whose named activities are 287(g) participation, “[c]ooperation with ICE detainers and other jurisdictional responsibilities related to immigration enforcement” and information sharing, with at least one investment required. The page carries no publication date in its text; its application period opened 2025-07-28 and it records “Last updated March 27, 2026”.
  • Litigation, read in full. State of Illinois v. FEMA, D.R.I. 1:25-cv-00206 — the Memorandum and Order (Dkt 71), the Order enforcing judgment (Dkt 75) and the surrounding filings are free PDFs in CourtListener’s RECAP archive (storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.rid.59597/). An earlier search could not open the docket and found no opinion in CourtListener’s opinion database; the RECAP archive got past both. The appeal is 1st Cir. 25-2131: the government has taken three extensions for its opening brief (2026-02-12, 2026-05-07, 2026-07-14), its 2026-07-06 motion describes the appeal as being from “the district court’s (Smith, J.) final judgment for the Plaintiffs” and states that the Solicitor General has not yet decided whether to prosecute it, and no stay has been sought or entered. That is why the Status is blocked and not reversed.
  • The same 2026-07-06 motion substitutes Karen S. Evans as Senior Official Performing the Duties of the FEMA Administrator and Markwayne Mullin as Secretary of Homeland Security under FRAP 43(c)(2).
Action
restrict
Object
FEMA grant eligibility
ID
288