This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

Two months into President Donald Trump’s second term, his administration gave states an ultimatum: Cooperate with his team’s immigration crackdown or lose your federal homeland security funding.

Oregon and 19 other states including Illinois, New York and California fought back and won. A federal judge ruled in September that the Department of Homeland Security couldn’t attach such strings to its grants, which states rely on for counterterrorism and emergency planning. For Oregon, nearly $18 million was at stake. The money in the past has paid for everything from bomb detectors to a security analyst’s salary.

But after winning in court, Oregon officials logged in to a federal grant website to formally accept the money, only to find the button to do so was disabled. They thought it might be a system glitch until they talked to counterparts in other states. The button did not come back online.

Homeland Security officials signaled to the states that despite losing in court, they were likely to appeal. If states wanted the money now, they would have to sign a declaration promising to cooperate with immigration enforcement if they lost in the future. States argued this would violate the judge’s order, and they won in court again.

Finally in October, the department officially removed the immigration wording to which states had objected and that the judge had said wasn’t legal.

But the administration continued to dangle the money out of reach. This time, the department rolled out a whole new set of criteria that made it harder for all states — “sanctuary” or not, blue or red — to obtain any federal terror or emergency management funding at all. They required states to estimate their populations’ net of people who had been deported and they dramatically tightened the deadline for spending the money.

Trump and his appointees have faced intense scrutiny since September, when he cited “violent radical left terrorism” as the reason for ordering National Guard troops to Portland. The city disputes the characterization and has been fighting the deployment in court.

Meanwhile, a quieter battle has been playing out over money to fight the extremist threats that emergency management officials say actually exist in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere.

Oregon auditors reported that data from a security think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, puts the state at No. 6 nationally for violent extremist attacks from 2011 to 2020. In more recent years, the FBI announced a set of attacks on electrical substations in Oregon and Washington they suspected to be the work of neo-Nazis, as well as a series of Portland area ballot-box fires that the agency linked to an extremist of unspecified ideology.

“Insurrection, conflict, violence, bombings, all those kinds of things — the dollars that we use absolutely are invested to help prevent, and help us prepare to respond to, those types of incidents,” said Mark Ferdig, who runs the Regional Disaster Preparedness Organization in the Portland area, which is funded almost entirely by grants from the Department of Homeland Security.

But in social media posts and in press briefings, the White House indicated that Trump doesn’t trust Portland to use federal funding in ways that match the president’s priorities.

“He is genuinely serious about wanting to restore order in America’s cities,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in an October briefing, “but it’s become apparent that the local and elected officials in Oregon do not feel the same.”

The Department of Homeland Security declined an interview request for this story. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, an arm of the department that distributes grant funding, responded to written questions from an unnamed press office email.

“Cities and states who break the law and prevent us from arresting criminal illegal aliens should not receive federal funding. The President has been clear on that,” the email said.

It said that for too long, “FEMA’s programs have strayed from their core mission turning taxpayer money into a slush fund for woke projects based on outdated and flawed methodologies.”

The agency denied holding back homeland security grants, pointing to the money it made available in September if states agreed to help with immigration enforcement.

Lynn Budd, director of the Wyoming Office of Homeland Security and past president of the National Emergency Management Association, said states should not be compelled to align themselves with any federal administration’s politics when money for disaster victims and counterterrorism is on the line.

“There should not be any political ideology involved in the grants,” Budd said.

Eroding capabilities

The administration’s latest iteration of changes to homeland security grants has added obstacles that, this time around, threaten to make every state a casualty.

For example, states must officially certify their current population count net of people deported. States suing the government said in a court filing that the most likely source for a deportee count would be the Department of Homeland Security itself and that when North Carolina officials asked, they got no response. The states said the federal agency gave Michigan “only an approximate number of recently removed individuals” and that FEMA provided no indication of whether such estimates would be good enough. (Asked about providing states with deportee counts, a FEMA spokesperson said the agency could not comment on pending litigation.)

There’s also a much shorter window for all states to spend the money the department gives out: within the next 10 months, rather than three years. Emergency managers say the requirement is challenging because it takes time for local governments to propose specific spending to state officials, for the state to distribute the money, and for the locals to hire people or put out bids for construction.

Budd called the new deadline “pretty devastating” for all states, including Wyoming. She said states have received no explanation for the changing grant requirements.

“Do you have your crystal ball? I don’t have mine,” Budd said. “That’s one of the most frustrating things is the lack of communication.”

Asked about the reason for the latest changes, FEMA said they were intended to prevent fraud and abuse and weren’t related to the court’s rejection of earlier requirements forcing states to aid in immigration enforcement.

“These changes are neither arbitrary nor capricious,” the agency’s email stated. “They are part of a methodical, reasonable effort to ensure that federal dollars are used effectively and in line with the Administration’s priorities and today’s homeland security threats.”

While all states are affected now, sanctuary jurisdictions like Oregon remain the main force battling the administration in court. (Oregon’s sanctuary law, originated in the 1980s and enhanced in 2021, bars law enforcement officers from participating in immigration enforcement without a judicial warrant.)

Oregon estimates that without the federal money, two-thirds of its counties won’t be able to perform basic emergency management functions to prepare for and respond to disasters.

In Portland, the state’s largest city and the one with the highest terrorism risk, an average of $5 million a year in homeland security grants over the past two decades has paid for law enforcement training, rescue vehicles, bomb squad gear, mobile X-ray scanners and barriers that prevent cars from plowing into crowds.

The grant programs were established by Congress in the wake of 9/11 and initially focused on international terrorism, but local governments have since used them to boost their states’ overall disaster preparedness and combat the growing threat of domestic extremism.

Firefighters bought a drone with homeland security money and used it to investigate the arson of a 120-year-old church building in Portland. They flew the drone through wreckage investigators couldn’t set foot in because the building was likely to collapse. Investigators used it again when a 110-year-old brick apartment complex burned down.

During last year’s election, an arsonist set off incendiary devices on two ballot drop boxes in Portland and Vancouver, Washington, destroying hundreds of ballots. However, both ballot boxes were equipped with fire suppression devices that the homeland security grants had paid for. They prevented many more ballots from burning, local law enforcement said.

Homeland security money also pays for an intelligence analyst who briefs law enforcement on emerging terrorism risks and assesses the vulnerabilities of public infrastructure like water treatment plants. The analyst prepares threat assessments for major public events like professional sports games or the downtown waterfront Rose Festival, determining whether the airspace overhead should be temporarily restricted and identifying places where someone could leave a suspicious backpack.

“Those major investments that we make in planning projects and equipment and supplies and training, I think that that will essentially go away,” said Ferdig, who runs the Portland area’s disaster preparedness organization. “We’ll see more significant and rapid erosion of our capability if we are training less. And if there’s less equipment over time, it’s just going to dissipate. And that is worrisome.”

Ferdig and other Portland emergency managers started getting nervous about federal funding in early March, when they noticed that FEMA had temporarily turned off several of the computer systems used to pay grants to state and local governments. There was no warning.

Ferdig knew Trump had openly talked about abolishing FEMA and had ordered his cabinet to review the agency. The technical difficulty felt ominous to Ferdig.

Weeks later, the administration made its first attempt to withhold emergency funds from sanctuary states, prompting the lawsuit from Oregon and 19 other states.

The ideology of extremists

The administration’s aggressive stance on local counterterror funding is not just about pressuring states on immigration policy, according to Mary McCord, a former acting assistant attorney general for national security under President Barack Obama. It may also be driven by the types of political extremism the money is being used to combat.

When Oregon auditors reviewed the state’s efforts to combat extremism in 2022, they noted that incidents of extremist violence in the state between 2011 and 2020 were split nearly equally across political orientations.

That doesn’t fit the Trump administration’s narrative, said McCord, who is now director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at the Georgetown University Law Center.

In public statements and a September presidential memo on “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” Trump has painted political violence as coming solely from left-wing groups. His administration has designated “antifa,” a term for loosely affiliated participants in America’s anti-fascist movement, as a terrorist organization.

State and local counterterror funding is being withheld “because it was perceived by this administration to be all directed against the right,” McCord said. “It is a multifaceted strategy of trying to say, ‘There is no violence on the right. The violence is all coming from the left.’”

Lindsay Schubiner, director of programs for the Western States Center, said Trump’s actions on disaster response and counterterrorism are disturbing when coupled with his recent deployment of the National Guard to Portland to deal with immigration protesters. Schubiner’s Portland-based nonprofit, which tracks extremism in the Northwest, has previously labeled the Trump administration a threat to democracy.

“The administration is undermining the power of states and localities by holding back funding that allows them to serve their residents,” Schubiner said, “while at the same time relying on federal troops or attempting to try to increase control over communities, quash dissent and consolidate his power.”

The White House has made clear that it does, in fact, intend to take more control over Portland’s domestic security efforts, saying the local response has been too ideologically biased.

On Oct 3., the day before a judge blocked Trump from deploying the National Guard to Portland, Leavitt, his press secretary, railed against the city and its police force for arresting a “conservative journalist” while doing nothing about “radical left-wing lunatics” she said were acting as a violent mob. (The Portland Police Bureau is among the local agencies that have benefited from homeland security grants in the past.)

Leavitt’s comments were a response to ongoing nightly protests at the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland. ProPublica previously reported that, while incidents of varying intensity have occurred between officers and protesters, there has been no evidence to support the administration’s claim of a “coordinated assault” on the facility.

Leavitt said the federal presence in Portland would surge to protect the ICE facility. At the same time, she broached the subject of cuts to various forms of federal aid to the city.

“We think it’s despicable that these local elected officials who swear an oath to protect their people are preventing law enforcement from doing their jobs on the ground,” Leavitt said.

The press secretary said White House officials, at Trump’s direction, were already looking into ways to reduce the city’s funding. She did not specify the type of funding or how the White House effort fit with the Department of Homeland Security’s ongoing battle with states over grant money.

“We will not fund states that allow anarchy,” Leavitt said.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/12/02/portland-trump-dhs-terrorism-prevention-grant/