Well, this is an interesting turn of events.
D.C. District Court Chief Judge James Boasberg — not exactly known for playing nice with the Trump administration — has rejected a multi-state effort to block the federal government from sharing certain welfare-recipient information with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The lawsuit was brought by 22 states, two governors’ offices, and the District of Columbia. They challenged changes made by the Administration for Children and Families regarding data collected through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, better known as TANF.
The policy at issue permits TANF records to be shared with DHS and other government entities for program-integrity purposes, including verifying recipients’ citizenship or immigration status. The states also challenged a September 2025 transfer of individual-level TANF data to DHS.
They asked Boasberg to block implementation of the policy and prevent DHS from using information it had already received. But on Monday, Boasberg said no.
Now, before anyone gets carried away, like so many of these decisions we've discussed, this one is procedural rather than on the merits — the ruling does not hold that the administration’s data-sharing policy is lawful. And Boasberg did not reach the states’ claims that the policy violates the Administrative Procedure Act, federal privacy protections, or the Constitution’s Spending Clause.
Instead, he concluded that the states had not cleared the threshold requirements for emergency relief: i.e., showing that they had standing to sue and would suffer irreparable harm without an injunction.
The states argued that immigrant and mixed-status families would stop participating in TANF because they feared DHS might use their personal information for immigration enforcement. That, in turn, would push families toward other, more expensive state programs. Boasberg acknowledged that the prediction seemed plausible. But plausible is not the same thing as proven.
The states offered declarations from government officials predicting that participation would decline, but no statements from TANF recipients saying they intended to leave the program and no meaningful historical or statistical evidence showing that the new policy would produce that result.
“While such a consequence … seems plausible to the Court,” Boasberg wrote, the court could not simply “rest on its own intuitions.”
The states also claimed that they would incur substantial expenses revising application forms, updating computer systems, translating notices, retraining employees, and potentially notifying former recipients about the disclosures. But that argument fared even worse.
Boasberg concluded that those expenses resulted from the states’ own laws requiring them to notify recipients about how their information is used. In legal terms, that made the costs “self-inflicted” — and injuries caused by a state’s own policy choices cannot ordinarily provide standing to challenge federal action.
Boasberg also found that the states’ warnings about possible federal audits and penalties were too speculative. The new policy allows additional oversight, but does not require it, and the court would not assume that federal officials planned to impose unlawful penalties.
The practical result of this ruling is a meaningful (albeit preliminary) win for the administration. The expanded disclosure is now set to take effect on September 30, and DHS is not presently barred from using the TANF data it already obtained.
The lawsuit will, no doubt, continue, but for now, the states’ case faltered before Boasberg ever reached the merits — an outcome many court-watchers likely did not have on their bingo cards.
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