Trump Squares Off With San Francisco in Sanctuary City Rematch

The Trump administration faces an uphill legal battle Friday as it attempts to overturn a court injunction won by San Francisco preventing the administration from rescinding federal grants to immigrant sanctuary cities involved in the case.

The case before the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is a near carbon-copy of San Francisco’s successful lawsuit against the first Trump administration in 2017.

The parties, the facts, and the case law have remained largely the same over the eight-year span. Then and now, San Francisco is leading a coalition of local governments challenging the administration’s attempt to coerce sanctuary cities, which don’t cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, as unconstitutional.

But the political landscape has changed since 2017—as has the makeup of the Ninth Circuit, which has become more conservative after President Donald Trump added 10 judges to the court during his first term.

Read More: Trump’s Mark on Ninth Circuit Tested as Challenges Progress

The three-judge Ninth Circuit panel hearing this case has two Trump-appointed judges. In 2017, the panel was composed of two Democratic appointees and one Republican appointee.

The composition of the US Supreme Court is also more conservative, and it has shown a greater willingness to intervene in controversial cases through its “shadow docket.”

Still it’s hard to imagine a different outcome in the current legal battle, even if the Ninth Circuit and the Supreme Court have more Trump-appointed judges. Many of the legal precedents prohibiting federal intervention in local governing were pioneered by conservative judges and justices.

“I would be surprised if there are five justices on the Supreme Court who would uphold this kind of thing,” said Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University.

‘Here We Go Again’

The Trump administration is asking the Ninth Circuit to overturn a preliminary injunction issued in April by Judge William Orrick of the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

The injunction blocks a pair of executive orders requiring federal agencies to end funding to jurisdictions that limit their cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

Orrick, who oversaw the 2017 case and issued a similar injunction, said that the law has remained unchanged over the years. “Here we go again,” Orrick wrote in his April injunction order.

He rejected the administration’s arguments that the language of the new executive orders requires agencies to comply with the law and only review federal funds, not immediately rescind them.

Orrick said the cities have a “well-founded fear” that they’ll lose funds, and the aggressive public statements by administration officials means “fear of enforcement is even stronger than in 2017.” The judge pointed to the administration’s lawsuits against sanctuary jurisdictions including Chicago and New York.

The Trump administration will argue to the Ninth Circuit in the current case that the executive orders aren’t categorically threatening funding rescissions, but rather a grant-by-grant review.

In the 2017 case, Orrick’s final ruling found the administration violated a host of constitutional provisions, including separation of powers, the spending clause, the Tenth Amendment’s anti-commandeering principle, and the Fifth Amendment.

The Ninth Circuit in 2018 upheld that ruling, but only addressed the separation of powers arguments. It found that Congress and not the executive has the exclusive power to impose conditions on federal grants. The Supreme Court declined to take up that case.

Aggressive Tactics

Among the differences between the cases is the new administration’s aggressiveness in targeting local governments and its broader immigration agenda, including mass deportations.

“Withholding funds from a city in 2017 was a pretty drastic measure, but the goal posts have moved,” Douglas Spencer, a law professor at the University of Colorado, said. “Now this seems like such a milk-toast thing compared to all the other immigration actions.”

Under the new executive orders, the Department of Homeland Security has begun to add conditions for disaster relief under the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The Department of Transportation and the Department of Housing and Urban development have begun to include immigration policy conditions on their grants.

After Orrick enjoined the two executive orders, the administration issued another one in April that similarly sought to enforce new conditions. The judge had to issue a clarifying order prohibiting the government from bypassing his injunction with new executive orders.

The current Trump administration has show a greater willingness to withhold funds and wait for localities to sue, and not just in the immigration context, said Rick Su, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law.

“The ball is now in the cities’ court, and that’s costly,” Su said. “Because instead of just waiting for someone else to deal with it, you have to get in on this to get the money.”

That’s likely one reason why dozens of additional cities across the country, including Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston, have joined in on San Francisco’s lawsuit to get the protection of an injunction.

Those cities can’t expect to be covered under a nationwide injunction, which was significantly limited by a Supreme Court ruling this summer.

The aggressive threats have already shown some success, said Jacob Hamburger, a professor at Marquette University Law School. This summer, the mayor of Louisville, Kentucky received a letter from the Department of Justice stating that it deemed the jurisdiction a sanctuary city. The city later announced that it would honor the federal government’s request to hold detained immigrants for federal law enforcement.

“In parts of the country where local governments are not joining as plaintiffs, this does make a big difference,” Hamburger said.

The case is City and County of San Francisco v. Trump, 9th Cir., No. 25-3889, oral arguments scheduled 12/5/25.