Judge blocks Trump's cuts to anti-terror funding for New York City transit

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NEW YORK (AP) — Citing the 9/11 attacks and other threats, a U.S. judge on Wednesday blocked the federal government from diverting or withdrawing $34 million in funding to protect New York's transportation system from terrorist attacks.

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said the state of New York will “quite likely” be able to prove its claims that the money would be improperly diverted because the Trump administration wanted to punish New York for not cooperating with its massive deportation program.

The state sued the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Tuesday, noting that the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks let to the creation of the Rail and Transit Security Grant Program to protect transit systems from chemical, biological, radiological and explosives threats.

The city’s transit system isn’t the only agency facing cuts. The Trump administration slashed federal counterterrorism funding for the New York Police Department from $90 million to nearly $10 million, a move that Commissioner Jessica Tisch on Wednesday called “profoundly bad news.”

The Justice Department declined to comment.

In granting a temporary restraining order, Kaplan noted that the grant program was created with instructions that it be allocated solely on the basis of terrorism risk.

“Obviously, New York is no stranger to risks of terrorist attacks and it’s not just 9/11 that tells us that,” the judge said before recounting numerous attacks in the city since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six people and injured more than 1,000 others.

He also noted that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, described as the architect of the Sept. 11 attacks, was to be tried in New York until “enough pressure from Congress and the city’s administration” got the decision overturned.

“And he’s still in Guantanamo years later with no end to a trial in sight. Why did that happen? It happened because of an acute fear of terrorism attacks,” Kaplan said.

The judge said it was “reasonably likely, quite likely” that the city of New York will prove the Trump administration withdrew the money because it decided “New York should be punished for exercising its responsibilities in a way that does not satisfy the administration in what it calls the largest deportation mission in history.”

At an afternoon news conference before the ruling, Tisch warned that it was a “profound mistake” to take anti-terrorism funding away from “the No. 1 terrorist target in the world.”

“Cutting these resources now, in a time of global conflict and surging threats, puts lives at risk and will make our city meaningfully less safe. To be blunt, this is the difference between a city that prevents the next attack and a city left exposed to it," she added.

Besides the attacks on the World Trade Center, Kaplan said the city has faced scores of attacks since 9/11, including one where a man severely burned himself trying to set off a pipe bomb in the Times Square subway station in 2017, as well as when two pressure-cooker-type devices were found at the Fulton Street subway station in lower Manhattan in 2019, triggering an evacuation and affecting thousands of commuters.

The judge also mentioned a Halloween 2017 attack in which a man in a truck killed eight people on a bicycle path in Manhattan and the 2022 shooting on a subway train in Brooklyn in which a man wounded 10 passengers with gunfire.

The judge said he expressed no view on the administration's deportation program and believed a lawyer for the federal government was mistaken when he claimed that a temporary restraining order was premature because funds had not yet been dispersed on what was the first day of the new budget year.