Right now, in Santa Cruz, California, police officers are going without federally funded bulletproof vests. In Beaverton, Oregon, paramedics are losing the ambulances they were promised. In Fresno, a $2 million grant to test a backlog of 400 rape kits hangs by a thread, over paperwork the city won’t sign.

Cities across America are being handed the same ultimatum: cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, or lose the funding that keeps survivors, officers, and paramedics safe. DOJ grant administrators have told jurisdictions to sign a certification promising cooperation with ICE, or risk losing their money. More than 21 localities that originally received funding to clear rape-kit backlogs are now classified as “sanctuary jurisdictions” — including Fresno, which hasn’t obstructed any criminal investigation. State law — upheld by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals — prohibits the kind of information-sharing the certification demands, which leaves the city caught between two lawful obligations.

The federal government should stop conditioning public-safety funding on immigration enforcement, full stop. Every time a Global North democracy has tried this before, it has produced the same wreckage — and admitted the damage only after it was too late to undo.

I’ve spent years representing American Muslims at international human rights forums, and I’ve watched this maneuver surface repeatedly, across different countries and in different clothes. It arrives as a funding memo, a certification form, or a line item, rather than a clear attack on vulnerable and minority communities.

A recent Opinium poll commissioned by the transatlantic think tank Concordia Forum puts numbers to that erosion of trust: 85% of British Muslims and 81% of American Muslims believe democracy is the best system of government — yet only about one in five say they are always treated equally under the law. Communities that believe in the system but don’t trust it to protect them are exactly the ones this kind of policy is built to exploit.

The mainstream story frames this as a fight about immigration enforcement, but that’s not what’s at stake. The real question is whether the federal government can use unrelated public-safety money as a lever to force local compliance on a completely separate policy question. Because tying the two together doesn’t make immigration enforcement more effective; it just turns rape survivors, shooting victims, and cardiac patients into unwilling collateral damage.

The U.S. is repeating what Britain knows as the “hostile environment” policy. Launched in 2012, it was built on the same logic: deny access to ordinary services like housing, healthcare, banking, and employment until people prove their immigration status to the government’s satisfaction.

The result was the Windrush scandal, in which thousands of Commonwealth citizens who had lived in Britain legally for decades were denied jobs, evicted from homes, refused NHS treatment, and in dozens of documented cases, wrongly detained or deported, despite having every right to be there. Official estimates put the number of people eligible for redress at roughly 15,000.

Compensation, when it finally came, mocked the harm: years after the scheme launched, only a few hundred people had been paid out of well over a thousand who applied, and some died waiting. The government’s own reviewers eventually called what happened “foreseeable and avoidable.” Parts of the EU have quietly built similar tripwires into housing and healthcare access for migrants.

In each case, the most vulnerable were hurt first. Governments admitted nothing until the human cost became undeniable, and by then it was too late for the people who paid for it.

In Fresno, this is happening in real time. The city is simply trying to honor a state privacy law while a federal grant program threatens to strip the money it needs to clear a rape-kit backlog that has nothing to do with anyone’s immigration status. For a survivor still waiting on a DNA match, that evidence sitting untested on a shelf can be life changing.

Defenders of funding conditions argue that federal dollars come with federal strings, and that a jurisdiction unwilling to cooperate with lawful enforcement priorities shouldn’t expect Washington to underwrite its police department. But that argument quickly falls down, because courts have repeatedly found these conditions were never authorized by Congress in the first place — from City and County of San Francisco v. Trump to City of Chicago v. Sessions to the injunctions Judge William Orrick has issued against the current round of cuts. And even setting the legal question aside, a rape kit is not an immigration enforcement tool. Withholding its funding doesn’t advance the enforcement goal; it just adds a second victim to the first crime.

Left to run its course, this pattern will deliver the U.S. its own Windrush moment: a belated commission, a compensation scheme nobody trusts, and a list of people hurt while the argument was still being had. The fix doesn’t require resolving the immigration debate first.

International human rights bodies already track detention conditions and asylum backlogs as standing categories of concern. They should add “funding-conditioned enforcement” to that list — a formal category flagging, in real time, when a government makes access to unrelated public services contingent on enforcement cooperation.

Catching the warning signs now, while the money is still in dispute, beats writing them up in a report once the damage is done. Santa Cruz’s officers, Beaverton’s paramedics, and Fresno’s rape-kit backlog aren’t asking anyone to settle the immigration debate. They’re asking someone to stop pulling a lever that was never built to touch them.

Salam al-Marayati is president and co-founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. An expert on Islam in the West, national security and Middle East politics, he has spoken at the White House and on Capitol Hill, represented the United States at international human rights forums, and written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.

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