A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from withholding billions of dollars meant to support children and low-income families in Colorado and four other Democratic-led states while their legal challenge plays out.
In a two-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian of the southern New York granted the states’ emergency motion for a temporary restraining order, directing the federal government to keep paying grants covering cash assistance and child care funding for the next two weeks in the five states that sued.
The Trump administration announced this week that it was withholding more than $10 billion in social safety net funding to the five states, including more than $300 million to pay for child care and assistance for low-income working families in Colorado.
The states — California, Minnesota, Illinois and New York — filed their lawsuit Thursday, calling the funding freeze an unconstitutional abuse of power.
The freeze is the latest effort in a vendetta against Colorado, Attorney General Phil Weiser said during a joint news conference Friday morning. This week he filed a lawsuit alleging President Donald Trump had made a series of decisions that amounted to an attempt to coerce and punish the state, including canceling grants, denying disaster relief funds for people affected by fires in 2025 and vetoing a pipeline project for southeastern Colorado.
“The president says he wants to tell us how to manage our elections, he wants to tell us how to manage our criminal justice system,” Weiser said.
Trump administration freezes Colorado funding for child care, families in ‘deep poverty’
The Trump administration said the funding freeze was in response to fraud in the five Democratic-led states, but hasn't offered evidence of wrongdoing. Colorado has a False Claims Unit in the attorney general's office focused on efforts to defraud government programs and would be happy to work together if the administration raises specific concerns, Weiser said.
As is, vague allegations that undocumented people might be receiving benefits are a pretext for punishing states that have pushed back against the administration, he said.
"There's no evidence of fraud. This is being done out of spite," Weiser said.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services this week told the five states it was freezing their money for the Child Care and Development Fund, which subsidizes child care for children from low-income families; the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which provides cash assistance and job training; and the Social Services Block Grant.
Shelby Wieman, a spokesperson for Gov. Jared Polis, said earlier this week that it "would be awful to see the federal government targeting the most needy families and children this way.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the lawsuit, said the Trump administration is overstepping its authority by freezing billions of dollars in funds that were already approved for the states by Congress.
Subramanian, who was nominated to the bench by former President Joe Biden, did not rule on the legality of the funding freeze, but he said the five states had met a legal threshold “to protect the status quo” for at least 14 days while arguments are made in court.
In letters to the states, Alex J. Adams, assistant secretary for the Administration for Children and Families, wrote that HHS had “reason to believe” the states were providing benefits to people who were in the U.S. illegally, offering no further details about the allegations.
The government had requested reams of data from the five states, including the names and Social Security numbers of everyone who received benefits from some of the programs since 2022.
Jessica Ranucci, a lawyer in the New York Attorney General’s office, said in the Friday hearing, which was conducted by telephone, that at least four of the states had already had money delayed after requesting it. She said that if the states can’t get child care funds, there will be immediate uncertainty for providers and families who rely on the programs.
A lawyer for the federal government, Kamika Shaw, said it was her understanding that the money had not stopped flowing to states.
The government intensified its focus on the child care subsidy program after a conservative YouTuber released a video claiming day care centers in Minneapolis had committed up to $100 million in fraud. The child care centers were run by members of the city’s Somali community, which has been frequently maligned by Trump and targeted by immigration authorities.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, has and said his state is taking aggressive action to prevent further fraud.
The freeze will hurt not only low-income families, but also their employers if they can't come to work, James said. Even families that don't receive assistance for their child care costs could take a hit if centers have to reduce staff or close because they aren't getting paid, she said.
"Once again, the most vulnerable families in our communities are bearing the brunt of this administration's campaign of chaos and retribution," James said.
