A federal judge in San Francisco on Thursday blocked Donald Trump's administration from withholding federal funding from several so-called sanctuary jurisdictions that have declined to cooperate with the Republican president's hardline immigration crackdown.
U.S. District Judge William Orrick issued the injunction at the request of 16 cities and counties nationally led by San Francisco that in a lawsuit filed in February argued that the administration was unlawfully trying to force local officials to cooperate with federal immigration arrests.
Those jurisdictions include the cities of Minneapolis, New Haven, Portland, St. Paul, Santa Fe and Seattle. They argue that the administration is seeking to punish them for exercising their rights to limit the use of their resources for federal civil immigration enforcement.
A storied US agency, one that began under President Kennedy in 1961 with the aim of...
