The cities of San Diego and San Jose have scored a legal victory over the Trump administration, securing more than $1.5 million in grant funding that the administration allegedly withheld from their regional task forces 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 the agency had illegally conditioned grant funding for their regional Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force programs on two unrelated Trump priorities — immigration enforcement and the rejection of diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Earlier this year, attorneys for the administration signaled in court filings that they would no longer seek to impose those conditions. But at that time, the administration had still not released more than $581,000 it had previously awarded to the San Diego ICAC Task Force for fiscal 2025, nor more than $641,000 it had awarded to the Silicon Valley ICAC Task Force. The administration also began to withhold nearly $342,000 in unused fiscal 2024 grant funds from the San Diego task force.
Last month, the Department of Justice finally made those funds accessible to the task forces, according to attorneys for the cities. With that success, attorneys for San Diego and San Jose filed a motion Thursday to dismiss the lawsuit.
“By taking this on and winning, we ensured San Diego can continue its vital work protecting children, without being forced to choose between unconstitutional conditions and losing critical funding,” San Diego City Attorney Heather Ferbert’s office said in a statement.
“Our Office has focused on protecting San Diego from unlawful federal actions that threaten critical grant funding,” Ferbert’s office said. “For ICAC funds specifically, we’ve been clear from the start that these federal conditions had nothing to do with protecting children from online predators. Congress created the ICAC program to fund investigations that safeguard kids, not to pressure local governments on unrelated policies.”
The San Diego Police Department confirmed Friday that it now has access to all of its ICAC grant funding from fiscal 2024 and 2025.
“San Diego’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force plays a critical role in combatting online crimes targeting children,” the department said in a statement. “We are grateful to the City Attorney’s Office for ensuring our region can continue holding predators accountable and keeping kids safe.”
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Regional ICAC task forces are made up of personnel from local, state and federal law enforcement agencies and designed to help authorities crack down on various forms of online child exploitation. The San Diego ICAC Task Force, which covers San Diego, Imperial and Riverside counties, is comprised of eight specially trained full-time investigators, plus several more part-time investigators.
San Diego police Sgt. Daniel McClain, the commander of the San Diego ICAC Task Force, said earlier this year that the unit most commonly investigates individuals for possession, production or distribution of child sexual abuse material. In recent years, McClain said, investigators have also seen a large increase in sextortion cases, in which adults trick children into sending nude and sexually explicit videos of themselves.
The DOJ’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention provides grant funding to the San Diego ICAC Task Force and others like it, including the Silicon Valley task force, which covers 11 counties in the Bay Area.
Last year, the Department of Justice provisionally awarded grant funds to both the San Diego and Silicon Valley task forces, but just days before the January deadline to accept those provisional funds, San Diego and San Jose filed their lawsuit. It alleged the Trump administration had inserted the two “unrelated, policy-driven grant conditions” into the awards in what they alleged was an unlawful attempt to coerce the cities into implementing the administration’s agenda, in violation of numerous federal laws.
In late March, less than two months after the lawsuit was filed, the cities and DOJ made a joint filing declaring the immigration condition would not be imposed.
That same month, a federal judge in Chicago blocked the federal government in a different case from enforcing an anti-DEI condition similar to the one imposed on the ICAC funding. That ruling essentially blocked the Department of Justice from being able to implement or enforce the type of anti-DEI conditions that San Diego and San Jose had challenged.
That left the accessibility of the grant funds as the only remaining issue. With that resolved, a judge granted the motion Friday to dismiss the case.
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