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California and three other states sued the Trump administration Wednesday over its plans to slash $600 million from programs designed to prevent and track the spread of HIV, including in the LGBTQ+ community — arguing the move is based on “political animus and disagreements about unrelated topics such as federal immigration enforcement, political protest, and clean energy.”

“This action is lawless,” attorneys for California, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota said in a complaint filed in federal court in Illinois against several Trump administration departments and officials, as well as President Trump himself.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funding had been allocated to disease control programs in all four states, though California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office said California faces “the largest share” of the cuts.

That includes $130 million due to California under a Public Health Infrastructure Block Grant, which the state and its local public health departments use to fund their public health workforce, monitor disease spread and respond to public health emergencies, Bonta’s office said.

“President Trump … is using federal funding to compel states and jurisdictions to follow his agenda. Those efforts have all previously failed, and we expect that to happen once again,” Bonta said in a statement.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the named defendants, has repeatedly turned his agency away from evidence-backed HIV monitoring and prevention programs in the last year, and the Trump administration has broadly attacked federal spending headed to blue states or allocated to initiatives geared toward the LGBTQ+ community.

The White House justified the latest cuts by claiming the programs “promote DEI and radical gender ideology,” but did not explain further. Health officials have said the cuts were to programs that did not reflect the CDC’s “priorities.”

Neither the White House nor Health and Human Services immediately responded to requests for comment on the lawsuit Wednesday.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health said the cuts would derail an estimated $64.5 million for 14 different county grant programs, resulting in “increased costs, more illness, and preventable deaths,” the department said.

Those programs focus on response to disasters, controlling outbreaks of diseases such as measles and flu, preventing the spread of diseases such as West Nile, dengue and hepatitis A, monitoring and treating HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, fighting chronic illnesses such as diabetes and obesity, and supporting community health, the department said.

Those cuts would also include about $1.1 million for the department’s National HIV Behavioral Surveillance Project, which is focused on detecting emerging HIV trends and preventing outbreaks.

Dr. Paul Simon, an epidemiologist at the UCLA Fielding School and former chief science officer for the county’s public health department, said slashing the program was a “dangerous” and “shortsighted” move that would leave public health officials in the dark as to what’s happening with the disease on the ground.

Considerable cuts are also anticipated to the City of Long Beach, UCLA and nine community health providers who provide HIV prevention services, including $383,000 for the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s community HIV prevention programs, local officials said.

Leading California Democrats have railed against the cuts. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said the move was an unlawful attempt by Trump to punish blue states that “won’t bend to his extremist agenda.”

“His message to the 1.2 million Americans living with HIV is clear: their lives are not a priority, political retribution is,” Padilla said in a statement.

The states argue in the lawsuit that the administration’s decision “singles out jurisdictions for disfavor based not on any rational purpose related to the goals of any program but rather based on partisan animus.”

The lawsuit asked the court to declare the cuts unlawful, and to bar the Trump administration from implementing them or “engaging in future retaliatory conduct regarding federal funding or other participation in federal programs” based on the states exercising their sovereign authority in unrelated matters.

Lawyers say immigration judge found that the Department of Homeland Security failed to prove the Tufts student should be removed from the US.

A judge in the United States has blocked the deportation of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish Tufts University student who was arrested last year as part of a crackdown on pro-Palestinian activists, according to her lawyers.

Ozturk’s lawyers detailed the decision in a letter filed at the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday.

They said the immigration judge concluded on January 29 that the US Department of Homeland Security had not met its burden of proving she was removable and terminated the proceedings against her.

Ozturk, a PhD student studying children’s relationship to social media, was arrested last March while walking down a street as the administration of US President Donald Trump began targeting foreign-born students and activists involved in pro-Palestinian advocacy.

Video showed masked agents handcuffing her and putting her into an unmarked vehicle.

The sole basis authorities provided for revoking her visa was an editorial she co-authored in Tufts’ student newspaper a year earlier, criticising her university’s response to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

A petition to release her was first filed in federal court in Boston, where Tufts is located, and then moved to the city of Burlington in Vermont. In May of last year, a federal judge ordered her immediate release after finding she raised a substantial claim that her detention constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of her free speech rights.

Ozturk, who spent 45 days in a detention centre in southern Louisiana, has been back on the Tufts campus since.

The federal government appealed her release to the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals.

The January 29 decision, however, ends those proceedings for now.

Ozturk said it was heartening to know that some justice can prevail.

“Today, I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that despite the justice system’s flaws, my case may give hope to those who have also been wronged by the US government,” she said in a statement released by her lawyers.

Ozturk’s immigration lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai, said the decision was issued by Immigration Judge Roopal Patel in Boston.

Patel’s decision is not itself public, and the Trump administration could challenge it ‌before the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is part of the US Department of Justice.

Khanbabai hailed Patel’s decision, while slamming what she called the Trump administration’s weaponisation of the US immigration system to target “valued members of our society”.

“It has manipulated immigration laws to silence people who advocate for Palestinian human rights and the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” she said. “With this ruling, Judge Patel has delivered justice for Rumeysa; now, I hope that other immigration judges will follow her lead and decline to rubber-stamp the president’s cruel deportation agenda.”

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in a statement that Judge Patel’s decision reflected “judicial activism”.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem “has made it clear that anyone who thinks they can ‌come to America and hide behind the First Amendment to advocate for anti-American and anti-Semitic violence and terrorism – think again”.

The video of Ozturk’s arrest in the Boston suburb of Somerville was widely shared, turning her case into one of the highest-profile instances of the effort by Trump’s administration to deport non-citizen students with pro-Palestinian views.

Separately, a federal judge in Boston last month ruled that Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had adopted an unlawful policy of detaining and deporting scholars like Ozturk that chilled the free speech of non-citizen academics at universities.

The Justice Department on Monday moved to appeal that decision.