In Packed R.I. Federal Courtroom, a Debate Over Trump Grant Rules for Domestic Violence Services

Lawyers representing 17 coalitions against domestic violence arrived in Providence’s federal court Tuesday to reason why the federal government should be stopped from imposing new eligibility requirements on grants that sustain their missions.

Meeting them was a lone trial attorney from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on behalf of the department’s subsidiary, the Office on Violence Against Women (OVW). The office’s new grant eligibility and verification requirements go into effect Aug. 12, and are basically identical to those applied en masse by President Donald Trump’s administration to federal agencies’ spending priorities — namely, that taxpayer money not go toward any grant project seen as contradicting the administration’s position against DEI and what it dubs “gender ideology.”

It took over two hours for Senior District Judge William E. Smith to hear both sides’ arguments in a courtroom packed with advocates. The veteran judge said he would have a verdict ready before Aug. 12, although it would likely be “truncated” with a memorandum explaining his full reasoning to follow, given the short timeline. But even the case’s unique attributes could not suppress Smith’s sense of déjà vu surrounding certain details, like the feds’ understanding of gender identity or DEI’s impact on statute.

“Those two things have nothing in particular to do with domestic violence,” Smith told Justice Department attorney Kathryn Barragan. “It’s obvious in this set of conditions they are in pursuit of a larger agenda of the administration…They’re in the National Endowment for the Arts case, and they’re in every other case.”

“How could having a DEI program or promoting something for transgender folks have any relation to or detrimental effect on preventing domestic violence?” Smith asked.

“There’s a limited number of resources that can be put towards these grant programs,” Barragan replied, and she said the agency needs discretion to judge what falls outside its purpose.

Smith presided over the similar National Endowment for the Arts case earlier this year, and ultimately ruled in favor of the government while agreeing with many of the plaintiffs’ points. That case also centered on what Smith quickly abbreviated this time around as “NOFOs.” These “notices of funding opportunities” instruct applicants how federal grantees can spend their awards.

Under the Trump-directed grantmaking rules, applicants will also have to certify that any awarded funds comply with the new ideological priorities. In the case of domestic violence survivors, additional stipulations around not assisting undocumented immigrants are similarly harmful and should be negated, the plaintiffs argued.

But in the arts funding case, the grants in question were all merit-based and competitive. In this case, the domestic violence coalitions who serve as plaintiffs receive grants funded through a formula. But these organizations still have to accept the new grant conditions by Aug. 12 if they want to receive their next payment.

Kristin Bateman, a senior counsel from Democracy Forward and part of the plaintiffs’ legal team, argued in court that the formula grants these organizations rely on to continue operations are not subject to the same contingencies as merit-based funding.

“Congress specified that these are the purposes of the programs,” Bateman argued. “You have to give this money to these coalitions that have been recognized as the state coalitions, and here’s the amount you have to give, and it doesn’t provide for any sort of curtailing of that by the agency.”

Organizations accepting conditions possibly contrary to their mission, Bateman reasoned, would undermine the statutes which allocate and ensure this state-based funding, namely the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA).

Ideological restraints, Bateman noted, are irrelevant to the provision of subsidies. They could also imperil the work of organizations as they now fear prosecution under the False Claims Act, which she argued the federal government could apply to grantees if they promote gender identity even outside grant-funding projects, given the scope of Trump’s executive order that first authorized a crackdown on other ideas about gender.

Bateman referenced a case involving the San Francisco AIDS Foundation: “So what that means is that a grantee who is interacting with a transgender person, a victim who’s come in seeking services, would have to treat that transgender woman like a man, would have to use the wrong pronouns, the wrong honorifics, the wrong name, in order to avoid running afoul of this condition.”

Teaming up with Bateman for the plaintiffs was Daniel Jacobson, who previously worked in the Obama and Biden administrations but now leads his own practice in Washington, D.C. Jacobson pointed to ways in which the guidelines might create havoc for workers on the ground for their frontline organizations.

“They need to know if somebody comes in at 11 p.m. who’s undocumented and says, ‘I can’t go home tonight because I might be abused,’” Jacobson said. “Can they provide that person shelter or not? They can’t call up somebody from the Office of Violence Against Women to say, ‘Hey, can you tell me what to do here?’”

Smith appeared attentive to the plaintiffs’ arguments surrounding chilling effects on grantees’ programming and free speech. He was slightly more skeptical, or at least inquisitive, of plaintiffs’ ideas on how the agency action constituted illegality under certain provisions of the Administrative Procedure Act.

“It is not a crime to, ‘promote or facilitate the violation of federal immigration law,’ the last I checked,” Jacobson said, referencing one of the grant stipulations. “We don’t even really know how the government would interpret that.”

“Some kinds of facilitation of the violation of immigration law certainly would be illegal,” Smith replied. “And some wouldn’t.”

Smith pushed the coalitions to refine their arguments on the spot. His inquiries were sometimes met with a pause from the defendant.

“These terms are not conditions,” Barragan said in her opening remarks about the NOFO language. “They simply define what the plaintiffs cannot do under the grant program.”

Barragan said that “there haven’t been awards issued yet, and there hasn’t been an acceptance of those awards,” which effectively meant that the grant conditions debated by plaintiffs are not actually final yet — they are still “proposed.”

But Smith countered that the grant conditions have already been published and disseminated publicly: “The department has said, ‘We’re going to do this. If you apply, you have to certify to these conditions, and it’ll be in your grant.’ So they’re not proposed in that sense, right?”

“That’s true, your honor, but there is still not a final award here,” Barragan replied. “So the terms could change. The agency doesn’t have plans to change the terms, but there’s a finality issue here.”

Smith eventually circled back to the example of using pronouns. If an organization used a victim’s preferred pronouns when providing services, would that constitute a violation of federal policy?

“I want to be clear that the [Office on Violence Against Women] position is that using someone’s pronouns, if you’re treating a victim using their pronouns that they would prefer, as a matter of common courtesy, does not violate this out-of-scope funding activity,” Barragan replied.

The rift between the case made in the court and the Office on Violence Against Women’s grant conditions was further emphasized by a court declaration from the office’s Deputy Director Ginger Baran Lyons.

Lyons testimony noted that, in her tenure, the agency has never directed coalitions to turn away immigrants, and that the office’s staff are civil servants “devoted to seeing that shelter, rape crisis center, police precinct, courthouse, and hospital doors are open to all victims.”

“If that declaration was what’s in these policies, we wouldn’t even have a case here,” Smith said. “But there’s a complete disconnect between the condition that’s in the NOFOs and what’s in the declaration.”