Elijah Hurewitz-Ravitch, Staff Photographer

New Haven joined eight other American cities and counties on Monday in suing the Trump administration for alleged “unlawful conditions” included in the Department of Homeland Security’s recently updated terms for receiving federal grants. 

Chicago, the suit’s lead plaintiff, along with Baltimore, Boston, Denver, Minneapolis, New York City, Ramsey County, Minn., Saint Paul and New Haven, claimed in the lawsuit that the “Executive Branch has now determined to use this critical federal funding as a cudgel, threatening to hamstring local governments’ emergency-management functions unless they acquiesce to unrelated Executive domestic policy goals.”

The nine cities and counties take issue with sections of the DHS’s updated terms and conditions that require grant recipients to agree not to “operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, DEIA, or discriminatory equity ideology” and to agree to comply with all past and future executive orders.

A DHS spokesperson wrote in an email to the News that the lawsuit obstructs the president’s agenda. Recipients of federal funds, the spokesperson added, are required to follow anti-discrimination laws and cannot use funds for climate activism or for diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. FEMA has put in place new controls to ensure that all grant program activity follows the law, the spokesperson wrote.

At issue in New Haven is $93,597 awarded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s port security grant program, which would fund maintenance, upgrades and expansions to the camera systems around the city’s port, according to Mayor Justin Elicker. 

Those cameras are used to respond to incidents within the port — the busiest between New York and Boston — per Rebecca Bombero, a city administrator.

At a Monday press conference, Elicker said that the new grant stipulations “are ones that the City of New Haven cannot abide by, both because it does not align with our values, but also because it is just not practical for any municipality to be able to agree to such requirements.” 

Michael Bowler, an assistant counsel for New Haven, said on Monday that the DHS’s new terms and conditions will apply to federal grants from all agencies. 

“We’ll be continually applying for federal grants, like the city always does,” Bowler said, “but the standard terms and conditions now have these troubling terms with them, which we have to decide whether we will accept.”

The mayor described the new guidelines, along with President Donald Trump’s executive orders, as “intentionally vague.” The DHS did not immediately respond to the News’ request for comment about the new guidelines.

The city submitted an application in mid-August for over $2 million in grants to fund various port-related projects, according to Kayla Bland, the city’s emergency operations director. In September, New Haven was offered funding for just one project — the camera upgrades. 

Bland said that she thought that the grant was approved because it “fit within” the Trump administration’s “priorities of cyber security and physical security.” 

The deadline to sign the grant is Nov. 27. Elicker said he hopes that a federal judge will grant the plaintiffs a preliminary injunction before then, which would prevent the federal government from halting funding.

But if New Haven does not receive the money, Elicker said, “we’ll have to make a decision on whether we want to keep this infrastructure there — keep old, dilapidated infrastructure that may break — fund it in another way, increase taxes to fund these things.”

Monday’s lawsuit, filed in a Chicago federal court, is the third that New Haven has joined against the Trump administration. In February, along with San Francisco, Portland and King County, Washington, New Haven sued the federal government for allegedly targeting sanctuary city jurisdictions, and in March, it joined five other cities and eleven nonprofits in suing the government over funding freezes to environmental and climate projects.

A federal court granted two preliminary injunctions in the sanctuary cities case.

As in both of those suits, the Public Rights Project, a progressive, California-based legal advocacy nonprofit, is helping represent New Haven and covering many of its legal costs, according to Elicker.  

The mayor said that despite the aggressive posture he has taken toward the Trump administration, he is not worried about drawing more attention to New Haven than it otherwise might receive.

“I hear from some of my mayoral colleagues out there that they don’t want to make their cities a target,” Elicker said. “Now is a time that we should not be hiding. Now is a time that we should be standing up and fighting for the values of our community, both because at some point we’re all going to be a target anyway, but more importantly, because this is the right thing to do.”

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem is the lead defendant in the case.  

Update, Oct. 22: This article has been updated to include information from a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson.