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BALTIMORE, MD – Attorney General Anthony G. Brown and a coalition of 20 attorneys general secured a court order blocking the federal administration’s unlawful attempt to gut essential health, education, and social service programs for low-income families.
“This is a victory for every Maryland family who depends on Head Start, Title X clinics, food banks, and shelters, and it ensures the Trump Administration cannot strip that care away based on immigration status,” said Attorney General Brown. “My Office stood up to protect our most vulnerable neighbors, and the courts agreed.”
In July 2025, Attorney General Brown filed a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s reinterpretation of a decades-old law governing access to social services. Four federal agencies – the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Education (ED), Labor (DOL), and Justice (DOJ) – issued a coordinated set of directives abruptly redefining longstanding policy under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). For nearly 30 years, Republican and Democratic administrations alike interpreted PRWORA to allow states to offer vital public health, education, and anti-poverty programs regardless of immigration status. The Trump administration’s sudden reversal would have forced states to impose immigration status verification on countless services, threatening catastrophic funding losses and program closures.
In Maryland, for example, the Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) administers funding programs to combat poverty and support low-income families statewide. Implementing the new policy would have required DHCD and subgrantees who receive funding through DHCD to create new verification systems to screen the hundreds of thousands of Marylanders each year who depend on various state programs. If legal status could not be verified, these programs would have to turn away homeless veterans, battered women and children, and others.
Yesterday, a federal court granted the coalition’s motion for summary judgment, vacating the administration’s sweeping rules that threatened programs like Head Start, Title X family planning clinics, food banks, domestic violence shelters, adult education, and community health centers.
In filing this lawsuit, Attorney General Brown was joined by the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Hawai‛i, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin.
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