MANHATTAN (CN) — New York City sued the Trump administration Friday to recoup $80.5 million in migrant housing aid that the city says was abruptly rescinded and illegally pilfered from public coffers by Trump’s Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“On Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2025, at 4:03 p.m., the long arm of the federal government reached into a central bank account of the City of New York and grabbed $80,481,861.42. It took these funds from the city without any advance notice that it would be doing so and without communicating any decision or rationale to the city,” the New York City Law Department wrote in a 50-page civil complaint filed in Manhattan federal court.
The city’s embattled Democratic mayor Eric Adams said Friday the previously approved $80 million, paid and then rescinded by FEMA “is the bare minimum our taxpayers deserve.”
“Without a doubt, our immigration system is broken, but the cost of managing an international humanitarian crisis should not overwhelmingly fall onto one city alone,” he said. “With very little help from the federal government, our administration has skillfully managed an unprecedented crisis, which has seen over 231,000 people enter our city asking for shelter.”
New York City Comptroller — and 2025 Democratic mayoral hopeful — Brad Lander quickly took credit Friday evening for pressuring Adams into taking the Trump administration to task over the FEMA funds.
“After my office discovered that Elon Musk and his DOGE goon squad stole $80 million out of the City’s coffers, we successfully pressured Mayor Adams to allow the City’s lawyers to sue the federal government to get our money back,” he wrote in a statement. “The lawyers who are standing up to President Trump and Eric Adams’ collusion deserve praise and we look forward to Donald Trump returning the money he stole from New York.”
In addition to Trump, the suit names as co-defendant Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who boasted on social media that she had “clawed back the full payment that FEMA deep-state activists unilaterally gave to NYC migrant hotels.”
Noem claimed the FEMA money “was funding the Roosevelt Hotel that serves as a Tren de Aragua base of operations,” referencing the Venezuelan gang whose presence Trump and his allies have seized on and made it the face of the supposed threat from migrants, recently issuing an executive order designating the gang a foreign terrorist organization.
The city claims the Trump administration’s withholding of these funds is arbitrary and capricious, in excess of authority, and violates the due process clause, the separation of powers doctrine, and the spending slause of the U.S. Constitution.
The city seeks a preliminary and permanent injunction, as well as a temporary restraining order ordering the defendants to return the $80 million to the city’s bank account. The city also wants the defendants barred from taking any more money from any city bank account in connection with these Shelter and Service Program (SSP) grants and from withholding SSP funds.
This month, FEMA sent nearly $80.5 million to reimburse the city under a program that Congress funded to “support sheltering and related activities provided by non-federal entities, in support of relieving overcrowding in short-term holding facilities of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.”
FEMA awarded the city the grants to ensure “the safe, orderly, and humane release of noncitizen migrants from DHS short-term holding facilities,” the city says, but three weeks into Trump’s second term as president, the federal government took back those funds.
Instead of sufficient notice or explanation, the city says the federal government belatedly provided the city a noncompliance letter on Feb. 19 that did not identify any noncompliance by the city.
The city says the letter was merely a cover to mask the real purpose of the Trump administration “money grab” — to withhold the funds permanently because they oppose the purposes for which the funds were appropriated and paid.
New York’s lawsuit plays out amid ongoing political tension between the city and the Trump administration over accusations that the Justice Department brokered a quid pro quo agreement to drop pending bribery charges against Mayor Adams in exchange for cooperation with Trump’s mass deportation agenda.