By Ronald Brownstein

The Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement and National Guard deployments have ignited searing conflicts between the federal government and local officials in Democratic-run cities. But those battles are only the most visible manifestation of a much broader effort by President Donald Trump to exert unprecedented control over the nation’s large urban centers.

The administration is pressuring cities to adopt conservative policies on issues including racial diversity, transgender rights and immigration by moving to rescind their funding from a wide array of federal programs unless they do so. With tens of billions of dollars in funding at stake, the administration is using the lever of federal dollars to impose right-leaning policies popular in red jurisdictions on blue states and cities that have rejected them.

The requirements that federal agencies now “seek to impose leave (local governments) with the Hobson’s choice of accepting illegal conditions that are without authority, (and) contrary to the Constitution … or forgoing the benefit of grant funds… that are necessary for crucial local services,” wrote a coalition of dozens of major cities and counties in a sweeping lawsuit against some of these conditions this summer.

So far, lower courts have struck down many of these demands from the administration — including in that omnibus case, King County v. Turner, brought by dozens of localities against the requirements the administration has attached to grants from the Departments of Transportation, Health and Human Services and Housing and Urban Development. But the legal fights have many more rounds to go.

And the administration has signaled no slackening in its determination to pressure cities, with Trump openly musing about dispatching the National Guard into more communities, and federal departments announcing billions of dollars in further grant cancellations to blue jurisdictions during the government shutdown.

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Experts in urban policy chart two distinct phases in the administration’s fiscal pressure on cities. The first wave, during the initial months of Trump’s second term, centered on reducing or eliminating federal support for various government functions important to cities. These included the rescinding of billions of dollars in Environmental Protection Agency grants for groups working to mitigate environmental threats to low-income communities, hundreds of millions of dollars in Justice Department grants for groups working to reduce violence, $11 billion in public health grants, and $600 million in Education Department grants that localities used to help train teachers.

The administration is continuing with these categorical retrenchments, including the Transportation Department’s recent moves to claw back grants that supported city bike lanes and pedestrian safety improvements that it views as “hostile to motor vehicles.” But over time, the administration’s focus has shifted more toward mandating that cities receiving virtually any ongoing source of federal support commit to enforcing an array of conservative policies.

“They don’t have the authority to come in and say this is how your state (or city) must run,” said Cristine Soto DeBerry, executive director of Prosecutors Alliance Action. “So the tether they have is these federal dollars, and they are trying to mash all of their ideological preferences into the contracting and funding basket.”