NEW YORK — A federal judge in New York on Thursday held that the Trump administration’s decision to withhold tens of millions of dollars from the MTA to protect against terrorist attacks because the city’s sanctuary protections don’t align with the president’s anti-immigrant policies was “a blatant violation of the law.”

In a 28-page opinion, Manhattan Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan issued a final judgment on the matter, beginning with a solemn reference to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

“On September 11, 2001, blocks away from this courthouse, nearly 3,000 people lost their lives in a devastating terrorist attack that destroyed the World Trade Center. In the decades since, New York City has remained a prime target for terrorist attacks,” Kaplan wrote.

“Among the City’s foremost targets are its bridges, tunnels, and subway and commuter rail systems. The subways alone have been the subject of at least eight terrorist plots since.”

State Attorney General Tish James’s office had asked the courts to require the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a component of the Department of Homeland Security, to grant New York $33.8 million for anti-terrorism protections through its Transit Security Grant program and not give it to other, less at-risk applicants, upon learning the Trump administration was going to cut the funding the MTA has relied on for years on Sept. 30, the eve of the new federal fiscal year.

At as press conference Thursday to address the MTA cuts and others Trump has imposed on the city, Gov. Kathy Hochul said her message to Washington was to “stop trying to defund our police, stop playing political games with people’s lives.”

The decision to cut the funding was one of several recent moves by the Trump administration targeting the president’s home state and its Democratic leadership. On Thursday, the city’s Department of Education sued the federal Education Department over its withholding of magnet school grants because of its gender policy on bathrooms not aligning with the Republican Party’s transgender policies, while Sen. Chuck Schumer railed against the administration’s freeze on funds for the Gateway Hudson River tunnel project.

“Call it Washington whiplash. You cannot possibly fathom all the different dynamics we are experiencing,” the governor said when asked how she was able to run New York amid the spate of funding cuts.

“We’re constantly having to be in a reactive mode.”

After indicating it would grant New York the subway anti-terror money, FEMA decided to withhold it at the last minute based on the city’s sanctuary protections for undocumented immigrants, “not in any respect because it is not a terrorist target,” as Congress intended when it created the program, Kaplan noted in his opinion.

“Here, Congress did not authorize the DHS Secretary to fix immigration-related terms or conditions on the disbursement of TSGP funds. To the contrary, Congress prohibited DHS from imposing such terms by requiring the selection of grant recipients to be ‘based solely on risk,’” Kaplan wrote Thursday.

Kaplan’s decision also noted that FEMA hadn’t withheld funding from other TSG program applicants located in sanctuary cities — like the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority in Philadelphia and New Jersey Transit Corporation in Newark — and had even increased some grants to such cities or entities while eliminating all funding to the MTA.

Lawyers for the federal government had argued that there was no evidence the decision-making behind withholding the funds was arbitrary and capricious, that the cuts would cause irreparable harm, and that the money at issue had lapsed by the time the AG’s office sought the court’s intervention and had already been irreversibly obligated to other recipients.

That last position stood in contrast to Trump bowing to pressure last week and vowing to restore $187 million in separate antiterrorism funding cuts to the NYPD and other New York law enforcement agencies following widespread outrage from both sides of the political aisle. The government had stated in litigation related to that funding that the money had been irreversibly “obligated” to other applicants before Trump announced in a Truth Social post that he’d restore the funds.

In his Thursday opinion, Kaplan highlighted the inconsistency.

“(The) government’s view appears to be that the president unilaterally can deobligate grants to and reobligate grants among grantees, but a court may not order the government to do so in order to enforce federal statutes,” he wrote.

“There is no statutory or other authority for such a position. The funds either are available or they are not.”

A spokesperson for DHS did not respond to a request for comment on the ruling.

The MTA’s chief security officer, Michael Kemper, in a statement, said, “The success and safety of the nation’s largest city and transit system is critical, and New Yorkers expect that their hard-earned federal tax dollars are invested back in keeping New Yorkers safe.”

At a press conference, AG James welcomed the outcome.

“This decision really is an important day for New Yorkers — for every commuter, for every transit worker, and every family that relies on our subways, our buses and trains every day. There is generally no public interest in the perpetuation of an unlawful agency action — none whatsoever,” the AG said.

Since the TSG program was established in the years following the September 11 terrorist attacks, the MTA has received millions of dollars annually to protect its transportation infrastructure from terrorist attacks, including with technologies that can detect weapons of mass destruction.

NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch last week called the decision a “profound mistake.” She said the money had also funded canine units trained to detect explosive, chemical, or radiological threats in subway stations and tunnels, the employment of undercover officers and heavy weapons teams, and the implementation of broad surveillance systems.

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