NY sues Trump admin over $10B in frozen childcare funds to blue states

New York is suing President Trump’s administration over its move to freeze $10 billion in child care and social services funding to Democrat-led states — calling it “cruel.”

The spending halt amounted to an unconstitutional act of political retribution that would have “devastating” impacts on low-income and vulnerable families, the scathing federal lawsuit filed Thursday by State Attorney General Letitia James and four of her blue-state peers contended.

Gov. Kathy Hochul revealed the lawsuit during a PIX11 interview, harshly condemning the cuts.

“Donald Trump is literally declaring war on kids,” she said.”They’re just using this as a fishing expedition to go after New Yorkers.”

Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services this week froze the funding to five states — California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York — over concerns that the benefits were fraudulently funneled to non-citizens.

The move followed heightened scrutiny over a long-simmering fraud scandal in Minnesota.

But James and her fellow attorneys general argued in the lawsuit that Trump officials already had ways to handle potential fraud without resorting to a freeze.

Instead, the Trump administration took a “shoot first ask questions later” approach cutting off funding while asking the states to provide evidence that could confirm officials’ fraud suspicions, the lawsuit argues.

“In short, Defendants have publicly stoked allegations of fraud, including Plaintiff States purportedly providing unlawful benefits to undocumented immigrants, regardless of whether they have been substantiated, and used those speculative allegations as a pretextual justification to punish perceived political enemies of the Trump Administration by unlawfully withholding critical funding pending purported fraud detection measures unauthorized by any statute,” the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court seeks an order declaring the freeze illegal and putting a stop to it.

— Additional reporting by Vaughn Golden