Trump Administration Hijacks Police Grants to Leverage Local Police For Its Authoritarian Ends

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The Trump Administration has a nightmarishly authoritarian vision of what law enforcement should look like. In Memphis, for example, thousands of federal, state, and local law enforcement agents have invaded the city’s streets this year at the invitation of Tennessee’s Trump-supporting governor. Working as part of a 31-agency task force, they have carried out aggressive patrols, mass traffic stops, and large-scale immigration arrests, terrorizing local communities. Agents have engaged in such behaviors as tackling and arresting people for exercising their constitutional right to film the police, swerving at observers with their vehicles, following and photographing them, and otherwise intimidating them (All this is detailed in a lawsuit filed by my ACLU colleagues and in dismaying first-hand accounts of this behavior by victims.)

This is a model that the Trump Administration would apparently like to spread to other cities, especially communities of color: flooding neighborhoods with aggressive, repressive, and frequently lawless agents and officers, blanketing communities with surveillance, and generally seeking to turn state and local police agencies into instruments of Trump’s federal government — its ideological obsessions, racism, and approach of loyalty over law.

Last week, the Justice Department announced a “Model Cities Initiative” — a nearly $300 million grants program that “leverages technology, data, and partnerships to address drivers of crime” and “will provide substantial, targeted funding to select cities to realize this vision.” The money would be concentrated in 2-4 hand-picked cities to, in the DOJ’s ominous words, “transform public safety.” Presumably as a “model” to eventually spread further.

It would be more accurately labeled “nightmare cities.” A DOJ information sheet on the program starts with an outright falsehood: “In cities across America, violent crime and public disorder have surged over the past few years.” Building on that lie, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche further ominously boasts that “This administration is leveraging every authority” for the initiative and that it will “supercharge our law enforcement partners.”

The DOJ explicitly links this program to the Memphis surge, boasting that

Recent surges of federal law enforcement in cities like Memphis, Tennessee, and Washington, DC. have demonstrated the successes that the US. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Trump Administration have had when resources are laser focused on providing cities with the tools they need to reduce violence, crime, and disorder.

The initiative is heavily weighted towards surveillance. Among the “allowable costs” the grants will cover is the purchase of technology from an all-star list of today’s most potentially authoritarian tools. Topping the DOJ’s list are:

• Real-time crime centers
• Forensic and DNA tools
• Body-worn cameras
• License plate readers
• Artificial intelligence systems
• Small unmanned aircraft systems (“UAS”)
• Counter-UAS

Cities that want to receive these grants also have to agree to conditions, including cooperating with the administration’s anti-immigrant campaign. That campaign is not popular among most urban populations, but participating cities may be, like Memphis, places where governors who support the Trump agenda are able to impose this kind of policing. And police departments in cities across the nation are often hungry for these kinds of technologies, and feel they need federal grants to increase hiring and the like.

Administration sinking its hooks into local law enforcement
The strings the DOJ attaches to the grants is part of a larger Trump pattern of hijacking normal ongoing streams of federal funding to increase control of local police departments and communities and push its ideological obsessions. According to an analysis by the centrist Third Way think tank, which supports increased funding for police, “sweeping new conditions on grants” that the administration began imposing in 2025 “drag public safety funding into the White House’s ideological battles over immigration, gender, vaccines, diversity initiatives, and other unrelated political priorities.” The analysis concludes,

Taken together, these conditions represent a major shift in how the federal government supports public safety in American communities. Instead of directing DOJ grants toward proven public safety needs, the Administration is using them to reward political alignment and punish independence.

This program does include some traditional federal grants that have given cities the flexibility to run pilot programs for increased mental health and substance abuse services and services to decrease incarceration. The problem is how it conditions these federal funds on local cooperation with violent federal policing and expanded surveillance and data collection. Communities shouldn’t have to give away their privacy and autonomy and accept the presence of masked federal agents to access federal money for evidence-based prevention programs.

Overall, if you liked what we saw in Minneapolis and you like what we’re seeing in Memphis, then you’re going to love the Trump Administration’s Model Cities Initiative. The brutal and lawless surge of anti-immigrant federal agents into Minneapolis seems to have been highly unpopular among the American people and has been more or less brought to a close, but the same approach is at work in the Administration’s policing surges that target low income Black and Brown communities in addition to immigrants. Ostensibly aimed at solving the imaginary “American carnage” that Trump talked about in his off-kilter 2017 inaugural speech, this kind of policing is unconstitutional, racist, and counterproductive, and Congress should put a stop to the Trump Administration’s use of federal grant money as bait to sink its hooks into local police agencies and communities.