SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge placed a nationwide hold Tuesday on President Donald Trump's order to strip funds from municipal governments that refuse to cooperate fully with immigration agents.
U.S. District Judge William H. Orrick III, an Obama appointee based in San Francisco, said Trump's Jan. 25 order, directed at so-called sanctuary cities and counties, unconstitutionally infringed on the rights of local governments.
The case was the first legal test of Trump's order, which has left cities and counties across the nation fearful of losing massive amounts of federal funds.
The ruling stemmed from lawsuits by San Francisco and Santa Clara County challenging the order. Among other claims, the suits argued that the directive violated the 10th Amendment, which protects states from federal government interference.
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In making his ruling, Orrick found that San Francisco and Santa Clara County had shown the temporary ban was needed to prevent the upheaval to their budgets and ability to provide services that would have occurred if the punishments promised in Trump's order were enacted.
A decision on whether to keep the ban in place while the legal battle over the order continues will be made later.
The judge rejected a last-minute bid a lawyer for the Justice Department made during an April 14 hearing to downplay the significance and reach of Trump's order.
Contrary to widespread impressions, the attorney told the judge the order would affect only limited law enforcement grants handed down by the Justice Department and the Office of Homeland Security — not all of the billions in funding local municipalities receive from the federal government.
Orrick wrote in his 49-page ruling that while the lawyer's explanation would have watered down the president's order to the point of no longer raising any legal problems, the new reading of the order was not credible.
The section of the order being challenged, Orrick found, "is not reasonably susceptible to the new, narrow interpretation offered at the hearing."
The wording of the order, the judge found, was so broad and threatened such serious penalties for cities found to be in violation of it that it crossed constitutional limits that give Congress, not the president, control of the government's purse strings and that restrict how the federal government can withhold funding from local municipalities.
"And if there was doubt about the scope of the order, the president and attorney general have erased it with their public comments," Orrick wrote. "The president has called it 'a weapon' to use against jurisdictions that disagree with his preferred policies of immigration enforcement."
"Faced with the law, the Trump administration was forced to back down," San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said in a statement after the ruling. "This is why we have courts — to halt the overreach of a president and an attorney general who either don't understand the Constitution or chose to ignore it."
Orrick also rebuffed a claim by government attorneys that an injunction should be limited to just San Francisco and Santa Clara County, saying the constitutional violations at play could affect towns and cities anywhere in the country.
Acting Assistant Attorney General Chad A. Readler also said that counties could not be compelled to comply with federal requests to hold immigrants in the country illegally for immigration agents. Readler called those requests "not mandatory."
Lawyers for San Francisco and Santa Clara County objected that Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions had suggested the order was much broader and questioned whether Readler's view reflected that of the administration's.
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Trump and Sessions have strongly criticized counties that refuse to hold immigrants in the U.S. illegally for possible deportation. No county in California complies with such requests because federal rulings suggest they could be liable legally if an immigrant later sued.
Trump's order directed the attorney general and secretary for Homeland Security to ensure that sanctuary jurisdictions "are not eligible to receive federal grants," a phrase that many cities and counties interpreted as a threat to withdraw all federal money.
The order left it up to the Homeland secretary to determine which governments were sanctuary jurisdictions. The term has yet to be defined legally, and policies differ among cities and counties that call themselves sanctuary jurisdictions.
Cities and counties around the nation have reacted differently to Trump's order.
The mayor of Miami-Dade County immediately directed jail officials to honor all requests by immigration agents because he said he feared the county could lose $355 million a year in federal funding.
If only police grants are threatened, the county would lose $6.5 million over two years.
Santa Clara County officials had argued the order threatened $1.7 billion in annual federal funding. San Francisco said it stands to lose at least $1.2 billion a year.