Justice Department officials are distributing up to $3 billion in grants to states and municipalities in what they portray as an effort to help jurisdictions recoup money they lost because of the President Joe Biden’s immigration policies.
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The grants — called the Bridging Immigration-related Deficits Experienced Nationwide (“BIDEN”) Program — represent one of the biggest pots of money the Justice Department has ever distributed. It can be used to hire police officers, buy technology or build temporary detention centers for undocumented immigrants.
The money also comes with one big condition: Municipalities that receive it must agree to partner with the Department of Homeland Security in carrying out the president’s aggressive immigration policies.
The grants are the latest example of the Trump administration aiming to reward state and local governments that cooperate with federal authorities on immigration — and withhold money from those that don’t.
The program also highlights the Trump administration’s ongoing focus on Biden 18 months after he left office. At the Justice Department, officials have created a “Weaponization Working Group” intended to show purported abuses by Biden’s DOJ. The group released an 882-page report in April alleging that Biden’s team misused a law intended to protect abortion clinics and pregnancy centers, which Biden DOJ veterans sharply dispute.
The BIDEN fund’s name itself appears to be a derisive reference to the former president’s immigration policies, suggesting that local governments spent heavily to pursue violent undocumented immigrants under Biden — “deficits” that now must be “bridged” by the grants.
“This Department of Justice is committed to ensuring Biden-era border disasters never happen again,” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, whose portfolio includes DOJ’s grant programs, said in a statement. “We are proud to once again champion law and order.”
DOJ’s grant announcement says the funds are, among other things, intended for “locating and apprehending aliens who have committed a crime under federal, state, or local law, in addition to being unlawfully present in the United States.”
While the aim of the money is to bolster immigration enforcement, the money can be used for everyday law enforcement operations, including hiring police officers, training personnel and equipment.
Trump repeatedly said during the 2024 campaign that the U.S. was being engulfed by “migrant crime,” despite little evidence of such a phenomenon. Trump at one point said the Biden administration had let in more than 13,000 “stone-cold killers,” a figure that diverged sharply from the evidence.
The 21-page BIDEN grant application does not actually require local entities to prove that Biden’s immigration policies cost them money, which could be hard to demonstrate. Rather, they have to show they would use the funds for the intended purposes and that they cooperate with federal immigration agents.
The BIDEN program was established and named by the One Big Beautiful Bill, Trump’s signature legislation passed last summer. The law allocates more than $3 billion through September 2028 for the new grants, and DOJ issued a call for applications last month, announcing an initial deadline of July 17, with more funding rounds to come.
The Justice Department says it received 181 applications in the first 30 days, a relatively small number given the number of eligible jurisdictions and the generosity of the grants, although that number is expected to rise as the application process rolls on.
The grant application says the Justice Department has decided to limit the grants to jurisdictions that formally cooperate with Trump’s immigration policies, something not specifically required by the legislation.
To receive a grant, a city must “fully participate” in the 287(g) program, which teams up local police with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It also must participate in the Homeland Security Task Force (HSTF) or other Justice Department enforcement efforts.
The 287(g) program empowers local police to arrest undocumented immigrants, but its most common use is enabling them to detain these immigrants in local jails for extended periods while waiting for ICE to take custody.
Such partnerships predate the Trump administration, but the number of municipalities and police departments that have signed up has skyrocketed since Trump became president in 2025, according to data from ICE.
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Others governments, particularly in Democratic states, have pulled out of the 287(g) program to protest what they see as Trump’s harsh immigration policies and deportation roundups. Those cities presumably do not qualify for the new grants.
Democrats said the BIDEN grants are an effort to force a political agenda on cities or risk losing critical funds.
“Even the name of the grant itself is a political statement that is holding critical funds hostage to achieve goals they haven’t been able to through legal means,” said Matthew Platkin, the former Democratic attorney general of New Jersey. “It’s a slap in the face to law enforcement.”
As state attorney general, Platkin led a coalition of 21 counterparts in suing the Trump administration for imposing similar conditions on another funding stream, DOJ’s Victims of Crime grants.
The suit was dropped after the Justice Department agreed to drop the immigration requirements. New Jersey has banned its jurisdictions from participating in 287(g), making the entire state ineligible for the BIDEN grants.
The BIDEN grants also contain an unusual provision saying recipients must agree to reimburse the federal government if, in the future, federal agents are surged to their area to tackle crime or public disorder.
Patrick Royal, spokesman for the National Sheriffs’ Association, said he expects more departments to apply for the grants as they learn about them. Many sheriffs’ offices joined the 287(g) program in the expectation that they would receive more resources for helping with immigration enforcement, he said.
“I can’t see why people wouldn’t take advantage of this opportunity to get more funding,” Royal said.
Distributing billions of dollars in grants is a long-standing function of the Justice Department, as it ships money to nonprofits, police departments and research groups in an effort to boost public safety.
In the first months of the second Trump administration, the Justice Department upended that process, abruptly canceling hundreds of grants to community organizations and local governments, including funding for victim advocacy and gun-violence prevention.
That has forced some nonprofits to lay off staff or to shut their doors entirely. Justice Department officials said at the time the grants did not align with the new administration’s priorities.
The department has since restored a small number of the canceled grants, and it has issued solicitations for new grants aimed principally at police departments and municipalities rather than nonprofits.
Amy Solomon, who headed the Office of Justice Programs — which oversees DOJ’s grant programs — in the Biden administration, said it is not unusual for administrations to align grant-giving with their broader policies.
Under Attorney General Merrick Garland, for example, DOJ gave priority consideration to applicants for some grants if their police department banned chokehold restraints.
But Solomon said such restrictions are typically far narrower than those in the BIDEN grants. Pressing a police agency to team up on immigration enforcement, she said, can fundamentally alter its mission.
“It changes what departments are doing with their officers and their personnel in a more fulsome way,” Solomon said. “It incentivizes behavior beyond what the grant will support. Immigration enforcement is traditionally a federal function.”
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