BOSTON (AP) — A federal judge in Rhode Island ruled on Wednesday that it’s unconstitutional to require states to cooperate on immigration enforcement actions to get funding for disasters, which is overseen by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

A coalition of 20 state Democratic attorneys general in May filed a federal lawsuit claiming that the Trump administration is threatening to withhold billions of dollars of disaster-relief funds unless states agree to certain immigration enforcement actions.

In a ruling granting a summary judgment to the plaintiffs and denying one for the federal government, U.S. District Judge William Smith found that the “contested conditions are arbitrary and capricious” and that the actions are unconstitutional because they are “coercive, ambiguous, unrelated to the purpose of the federal grants.”

“Plaintiff States stand to suffer irreparable harm; the effect of the loss of emergency and disaster funds cannot be recovered later, and the downstream effect on disaster response and public safety are real and not compensable,” Smith wrote.

Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said the ruling was a “win for the rule of law and reaffirms that the President may not pick and choose which laws he and his Administration obey.”

“Today’s permanent injunction by Judge Smith says, in no uncertain terms, that this Administration may not illegally impose immigration conditions on congressionally allocated federal funding for emergency services like disaster relief and flood mitigation. Case closed,” he said.

In their complaint, states argued that for decades they counted on federal funding to prepare for, respond to and recover from disasters. But they argued conditions put forward by the Trump administration requiring them to commit state resources to immigration enforcement put at risk funding for everything from mitigating earthquake and flood risks to managing active wildfires.