Spokane City Council hesitates to accept federal police funding, wary of strings

The Spokane City Council is hesitating to accept $1 million in federal funds to hire eight new police officers amid concerns it could force compliance with federal immigration detention efforts and presidential executive orders, despite reassurances from local police officials.

The Spokane Police Department applied last year to the Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Services, or COPS, Hiring Program grant, a program that has existed for more than 30 years but that the Trump administration has modified repeatedly to push applicants to assist in immigration detention efforts, among other conditions.

The department was awarded the grant in October, and the City Council was asked to accept the funds – and the strings attached – during its first meeting of the year. If the council didn’t accept the funds within the week, officials warned, the funding would disappear.

But activists raised concerns with the grant’s conditions, particularly an anti-sanctuary city provision that would prohibit Spokane from stopping its officers from releasing people’s immigration status to federal officials, per state law. Another condition would require the city to comply with all “presidential memoranda and all executive orders by the president,” such as President Donald Trump’s executive orders attacking sanctuary cities, diversity programs and “gender ideology extremism.”

Lacking clear answers to these concerns, the council punted on making a decision on the funds until Thursday and requested additional reassurances from City Hall.

Assistant Police Chief Matthew Cowles tried to reassure council members during a brief presentation Monday, claiming the department could comply with the grant requirements without violating the letter or spirit of state law.

“When we applied to this grant, we applied to it knowing the community’s expectations of our police department, working within the framework of Washington state law as well,” Cowles said. “And the Department of Justice awarded us this grant knowing that we were working under those auspices.”

Chief Kevin Hall provided council members some additional context, arguing the grant requires the city to allow officers to pass along immigration information that the department collected, but it would not require the city to collect that information in the first place. Spokane police have had a policy for over a decade to not collect immigration information during arrests, so it would not have any information to pass along, Hall wrote.

As of Monday, neither appeared to address the grant’s requirements for the city to comply with presidential executive orders. In a Tuesday email, police officials argued that the city believed it was in compliance with all “applicable presidential memoranda and executive orders” at the time of the grant application, wrote department spokesperson Dan Strassenberg.

“Any future guidance or directives issued by the current presidential administration will be reviewed and addressed on a case-by-case basis, as their content and scope are not yet known,” Strassenberg wrote.

Around a dozen activists spoke out against accepting the grant funds during the Monday night council meeting, arguing that council members were not adequately scrutinizing the implications of accepting the federal dollars.

A little over a year ago, the City Council voted to reaffirm Spokane’s commitment to the state’s sanctuary laws in a rejection of Trump’s ramp-up of immigration enforcement actions. Some argued Monday that the funds could be seen as a bribe or Trojan horse eroding the city’s stance against Trump-era federal immigration actions. The Spokane Police Department rejected that argument in its Tuesday response to The Spokesman-Review.

“To clarify, accepting this grant does not compromise the values of the agency or the City,” Strassenberg wrote.

Others noted that failure to comply with those requirements could open up the city to having the funds clawed back.

“I’m very concerned that we are potentially going to be deliberately committing fraud by accepting this,” Councilman Michael Cathcart said Monday evening. “I can tell you right now we are not following some of those executive orders, so we’ll be out of compliance. … We cannot do this if it’s going to put us in a situation where we will potentially have these dollars clawed back and potentially be sanctioned and not be able to access other dollars.”

Councilwoman Kitty Klitzke expressed sympathy over activists’ concerns but echoed police officials’ sentiments that Spokane could receive the funds without opening the door to enhanced immigration enforcement. Failure to thread that needle would have its own consequences, she argued.

“There’s a lot of grants out there from housing funding to transportation funding where these qualifications are being put in, and so all of us as governments, smaller governments … we are having to figure out how we can still stand up for our values and protect our democracy and not cut off our own citizens from federal funding,” she said.

“These are your tax dollars, and if we don’t use federal funds, how are we going to raise the dollars locally?”

Separately, Cathcart also raised concerns about the long-term funding for the eight officers the grant would help the city to hire. City staff estimated the cost to fund eight new positions for five years was over $6.1 million, of which the grant would only offset $1 million.

The city of Spokane Valley received $1.25 million from this hiring program in 2024 and reapplied in 2025.

Same issue, different term

The same grant program now under scrutiny also faced legal challenges and controversy during the first Trump administration. In 2017, the Department of Justice announced it would withhold funds from several grant programs, including the COPS Hiring Program, to any jurisdiction that did not cooperate with deportation efforts.

Specifically, the funds would only be available to jurisdictions that allowed officers to pass along immigration information to federal officials, allowed Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel access to local jails, and provided ICE a 48-hour notice before detainees were released.

In some cases, these stipulations were challenged in court and overturned. But in 2019, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle ruled that the DOJ could award extra points for COPS Hiring Program applicants that certified they would cooperate with immigration authorities.

The Spokane Police Department denied making any such pledge to the DOJ in its recent application.

“The original Notice of Funding Opportunity included an ‘Additional Consideration’ section detailing six optional categories applicants could choose to address,” Strassenberg wrote in a Tuesday email. “SPD did not rely on, reference, or make any commitments related to these considerations in its application.”