San Diego and San Jose are on the verge of a legal victory in a lawsuit over the Trump administration’s alleged withholding of funds from the cities’ task forces that are focused on investigating and prosecuting online child sexual exploitation.
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The two cities sued the U.S. Department of Justice earlier this year in San Diego federal court, alleging that the agency had conditioned grant funding for their Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force programs on the cities agreeing to implement two Trump administration priorities that are unrelated to combating child exploitation. One condition had to do with immigration enforcement and the other with the administration’s rejection of diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
In recent joint court filings, attorneys for the two cities and the federal government have indicated the Trump administration won’t enforce either condition, and they are nearing a resolution to the case. The biggest remaining question is when the funding that the federal government awarded and promised to the cities’ ICAC task forces will be available.
In the most recent filing in the case Monday, the two sides acknowledged that administrative holds placed on the grant funds had been removed, though the cities asserted that they “have not yet been able to confirm that they will receive the full funding to which they are entitled.” But the cities also indicated a willingness to resolve the case, either through a stay of the litigation or a complete dismissal of the lawsuit, once there is “confirmation that they will receive the funding.”
The San Diego City Attorney’s Office declined to comment on the litigation, except to cite portions of those recent court filings. The Department of Justice did not respond to messages seeking comment.
The case centers on federal grants that were awarded to San Diego and San Jose to fund their regional ICAC task forces, which are made up of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies and designed to help authorities crack down on various forms of online child exploitation.
San Diego police Sgt. Daniel McClain is the commander of the San Diego ICAC Task Force, which covers San Diego, Imperial and Riverside counties. McClain said the task force is made up of eight full-time investigators, and several more part-time investigators, all of whom receive specialized training to handle the delicate cases the team is assigned.
McClain said the task force most commonly investigates individuals for possession, production or distribution of child sexual abuse material — or what was previously known as child pornography. He also said that in recent years, investigators have seen “a real explosion” of sextortion cases in which adults trick children into sending nude and sexually explicit videos of themselves, usually by pretending to be a peer.
The adults “then extort (the children) to either provide more photos and videos of themselves, or even money and gift cards and whatever they can get,” McClain said.
The work of the task force and its specially trained investigators is a vital resource across the three counties, McClain said, especially considering the explosion in tips the task force has received in recent years from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which runs a centralized, national hub where online service providers must report suspected instances of child sexual abuse material.
McClain said that in 2021, the San Diego-area task force received 7,920 tips from NCMEC. In 2025, that number spiked to 29,213 tips, McClain said.
Late last year, according to the lawsuit, the DOJ’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention provisionally awarded San Diego more than $581,000 to continue funding the San Diego ICAC Task Force. The office also provisionally awarded San Jose more than $641,000 to fund the Silicon Valley ICAC Task Force, which covers 11 counties in the Bay Area.
But days before a January deadline to accept those provisional grant funds, San Diego and San Jose filed a lawsuit in San Diego federal court alleging the Trump administration had inserted the two “unrelated, policy-driven grant conditions” into the cities’ grant awards in an unlawful attempt to coerce the cities into implementing the administration’s agenda.
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The suit alleged that such coercion violates numerous federal laws, as well as “the separation of powers and other bedrock principles of the U.S. Constitution.”
Such allegations were neither new nor unique. Since President Donald Trump has been back in office, his administration has repeatedly attempted to condition federal funding on local municipalities complying with immigration enforcement and anti-DEI policies. That conditioning of federal funds has often targeted so-called sanctuary cities and has prompted numerous lawsuits contending that such conditions are illegal. Federal district judges have repeatedly sided with the municipalities that have challenged those conditions.
The court rulings have not stopped the administration from attempting to enforce similar conditions. On Tuesday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta accused DOJ of once again attempting to condition certain public safety grants awarded to California municipalities on the grantees helping the federal government with immigration enforcement.
“The Trump Administration is threatening to withhold critical public safety grants — again — if state and local agencies don’t assist it with its draconian mass deportation agenda,” Bonta said in a statement. “While the President may not agree with California’s policy choices, he cannot bully us into making different decisions.”
to Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, he asserted that the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has consistently sided with California and its municipalities in such disputes.
“We won’t let public safety grants become political bargaining chips,” Bonta said in his statement.
In the lawsuit filed by San Diego and San Jose over the ICAC grant funding, the immigration condition was actually resolved quickly, while the anti-DEI condition became the sticking point.
In late March, less than two months after the lawsuit was filed, the cities and DOJ made a joint filing declaring they’d resolved the issue of the immigration condition. In that filing, the government stipulated that the immigration language that the cities challenged “is not a term or condition of the plaintiffs’ awards or part of their award offers.”
The government also stipulated in that March filing that if San Diego and San Jose accepted the award offers, the government would not take that to mean the cities had agreed to the immigration enforcement language the cities had objected to and would not try to insert the immigration condition back into the grant funding by any other means. The cities agreed to drop their legal challenge to the immigration condition based on that joint stipulation.
But that still left the anti-DEI condition to contend over. The two sides were in the process of litigating that condition when a federal judge in Chicago issued a preliminary injunction enjoining the federal government from enforcing a “substantially similar condition” as the one imposed on San Diego and San Jose, according to a May filing in the local case.
The DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs, which oversees the juvenile justice office that awarded the ICAC grants, subsequently posted a legal notice on its website stating that pursuant to the injunction in the Chicago case, the office “will not implement or enforce” the type of anti-DEI conditions that San Diego and San Jose had challenged.
That decision left little for the attorneys in the San Diego case to litigate over, except for the release of the grant funding. The two sides told the judge Monday they’ll provide another update by mid-July on their continued efforts to reach a final resolution.
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