Charlotte Cravins’ son Landry turned 2 in January. He’s a smiley little boy who loves singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and recently got his first pair of glasses.

Landry was born with Down syndrome and has impaired vision. He receives publicly funded therapies that have helped him learn to crawl, to pull himself up to stand, and to use American Sign Language.

Landry lives with his parents and sister in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, one of the eight states whose attorney general has chosen to remain in a lawsuit challenging a federal rule that protects accommodations for people with disabilities. States are asking a federal court in Texas to declare unconstitutional a part of federal law that requires states to provide services to disabled people in their communities, rather than in institutions, when appropriate.

Cravins, an attorney, has followed the case with increasing concern. If the states succeed, that could strip disabled people like her son of the right to publicly funded services that allow them to live in their own homes and neighborhoods, and instead push them into institutions such as state hospitals and nursing homes.

“Landry is a part of our family, a part of the community,” she said, “and to present his involvement in our family and in our community as a burden is unconscionable.”

The lawsuit is unusual. It began in 2024 with 17 Republican-led states suing the Biden administration over its inclusion of gender dysphoria as a protected disability under a portion of federal law known as Section 504. The states also challenged the constitutionality of Section 504 itself.

But the suit has since morphed into something different.

After President Donald Trump was reelected and his administration made clear it would not enforce the Biden rule protecting gender dysphoria, eight states pulled out of the lawsuit. Their attorneys general scrambled to distance themselves from it, amid a swift backlash from the disability community that warned the suit imperiled federal protections for all people with disabilities.

But in a surprising move, nine states chose to stick with the lawsuit anyway, and in January amended their complaint.

They’re now asking the court to strike down a part of Section 504 that requires states to provide disabled people with services in their communities whenever possible, rather than in institutions such as state hospitals and nursing homes.

It’s a maneuver that has shocked many in the disability rights community. Those who spoke with Stateline said they have not received answers from public officials about why the states are still pursuing the lawsuit after the Trump administration removed federal protections for gender dysphoria.

The Republican attorneys general from the states involved either did not respond to Stateline’s requests for comment or referred Stateline to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is leading the lawsuit. Paxton did not respond to Stateline’s request for comment.

Last week, a few days after Stateline reached out, Indiana dropped out of the lawsuit, leaving eight states remaining.

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, a Republican, said he remains concerned about “federal overreach into traditional state matters” but felt that Trump’s move in December to officially exclude gender dysphoria from Section 504 protections meant the lawsuit’s core objective had been reached.

“Our goal in this lawsuit was to remove President Biden’s ridiculous addition of gender dysphoria as a disability, which risked jeopardizing services for those who truly need them most,” Rokita said in a statement. He noted he has a child with a disability; his son has Angelman syndrome, which causes developmental delays.

But eight other states are pushing forward with the lawsuit: Alaska, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, South Dakota and Texas.

Cravins, Landry’s mom, said she feels misled by Louisiana Republican Attorney General Liz Murrill, because Murrill initially framed the case as being about the inclusion of gender dysphoria and has not responded to questions about why her state remains involved after that’s no longer an issue.

“Other states left the lawsuit. Louisiana didn’t. Why?” Cravins asked. She said she’s written an open letter to Murrill about the case, with no response. “At this point, it seems that her issue is people with disabilities living in the community.”

States say in their revised complaint that updates to Section 504 unfairly restrict how they’re able to spend money and prevent them from deciding how best to care for their own residents. They say their budgets, strained by rising costs and workforce shortages, can’t always accommodate expensive service changes required by the law, and that with smaller Medicaid budgets they’re having to make hard choices. Removing the law’s “integration mandate” would give them more flexibility.

Disability rights advocates respond that if the court strikes down the integration rule, it will be harder for people with disabilities to get services in their communities. States won’t be required to provide those as a condition of receiving federal money.

And they worry the states’ efforts signal a return to darker times, when disabled people were hidden away, warehoused in institutions and far from family and friends.

“The reality is, the world was not built with us in mind, and there are people who would rather us not be here,” said Kaleigh Brendle, an advocate and college student who launched a nonprofit to push back against efforts to defang Section 504. “Us existing in the world makes people uncomfortable, with our braces, our canes, our wheelchairs, our differences.”

Nonpartisan, until recently

For decades, disability issues were largely nonpartisan. The two most consequential landmark federal disability rights laws were signed by Republican presidents: Richard Nixon signed the Rehabilitation Act — which includes Section 504 — in 1973; George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.

The requirement that states provide services for disabled people in their communities comes from the landmark 1999 Olmstead v. L.C. ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. Advocates hailed that decision as a civil rights victory that has helped shift disability care from institutional “warehousing” to integrating disabled people into the fabric of their communities.

“Now the states’ lawsuit seeks to upend all of that,” said M. Geron Gadd, a senior attorney with the National Health Law Program who focuses on disability rights cases.

Gadd said that as a litigator, she’s seen states shift how they fight disability-related cases: Instead of disputing how laws apply in specific situations, states are increasingly challenging the thrust of the laws themselves.

“States seem to be much more offended by having to conform their programs and services to basic requirements of disability law,” said Gadd. And, she added, “it seems to have become politicized in ways that it had not been for decades.”

State efforts have echoed those at the federal level.

The Trump administration has been pushing a rule change that would penalize disabled adults who live with their families and deduct the value of their bedroom from the amount they receive in federal benefits. Last year, Trump administration officials abandoned a proposal to cut disability benefits for older workers after news reports and public outcry. The efforts have been made in the name of government efficiency and reducing red tape, particularly in safety-net programs.

And in April, the U.S. Department of Justice delayed a Biden-era deadline — based on the Americans with Disabilities Act — for state and local governments to update their web content to make it accessible for people with disabilities.

Disability rights advocates say the conservative-led states and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services they are suing feel like two sides of the same coin, with disabled people and their families caught in the middle of the case, without a champion.

‘Something to fight back’

When Kaleigh Brendle was 17, she joined four other vision-impaired high school students in challenging a decision by the College Board — which administers Advanced Placement tests — to replace hard-copy Braille exams with a digital format during the COVID-19 pandemic.

They were successful. Brendle’s experience then, as well as her experiences pushing to get the accommodations she needed in school, drove her to advocate for disability rights nationally.

She named her new advocacy nonprofit Judy’s League, for Judy Heumann, a legendary disability rights activist known as the “Mother of the Disability Rights Movement.” Brendle likes to quote Heumann, who often said that disability can happen to anyone at any time.

Families and students with disabilities also worry the Republican states’ lawsuit could erode Section 504 protections for students if states were no longer required to provide services in public schools and could instead direct students to institutions.

As a student, Brendle received services locally that helped her learn to use a cane, to read Braille and to use accessible technology needed to complete school coursework.

At times she had to push for the accommodations she needed.

“But at least 504 gives you a leg to stand on,” she said. “It gives you something to fight back with.”

Similarly, Cravins worries her son Landry could have a hard time receiving services at his local school when he’s old enough to attend, even though he would be able to go to school with his peers with the right supports.

National disability rights groups — including the National Federation of the Blind, the National Down Syndrome Society and the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund — have continued urging the public to speak out about the possible loss of rights.

“It feels like it’s up to us as individuals to try and convince these people in these positions of power to stop attacking us,” Brendle said.

Cascading effects

On Monday, the states asked the judge to decide the lawsuit without a trial. Over the next few months, the states and feds will file briefs with the court. Disability community groups and allies will have the chance to file briefs as well.

If the states prevail, it’s hard to say what the cascading legal impacts could be. A win could trigger further litigation. Other courts might interpret the law differently.

A number of state laws, programs and other efforts have been built on the integration mandate and could be affected as well, said Mike Oxford, a retired director of an independent living center in Topeka, Kansas, who has been a longtime disability rights advocate.

“I’ve seen people with significant disabilities become great lawyers, academics, corporate leaders, on and on,” he said. “That would not have happened” without the integration mandate.

Oxford said he has not gotten a response from Kansas Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach when he asked about the case. He doesn’t think that the attorneys general remaining in the case believe it’s still about gender dysphoria.

“It’s just totally ridiculous,” he said. “They’re lawyers. They signed the new complaint. They know what it does and doesn’t say.”

If the court strikes down the integration mandate, that doesn’t mean the entire law is invalidated or in-community services automatically cease.

But it does mean that if a family were denied services outside of an institution, they’d likely have to pursue litigation each time to fight the decision, Cravins said.

“I think it’s important for the average citizen to realize that laws only work when there is enforcement behind them,” she said.

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s new decision gutting a key provision of the federal Voting Rights Act clears the way for state officials to drastically reshape not only Congress but also state legislatures, county commissions, city councils and even local school boards.

The ruling, released last week in a case called Louisiana v. Callais, dismantled some of the final guardrails protecting the electoral power of Black, Hispanic and other racial minority voters that had been enshrined in the Voting Rights Act, a landmark 1965 federal civil rights law that bars racial discrimination in voting access.

The 6-3 decision all but nullifies a provision called Section 2 that required states to draw electoral maps to give racial minority voters the opportunity to elect their chosen candidates.

And while intense national attention on the case’s fallout has focused on the U.S.  House as the 2026 midterm congressional elections loom, the new ruling also applies to state legislative districts and maps for county or municipal elections.

Those localized changes are just hovering further down the road.

“While everyone has been focusing on what this means for the power in Congress, there’s a whole other sector of power that it changes,” said Davante Lewis, an elected member of the Louisiana Public Service Commission and one of the litigants in a case that pushed Louisiana to create the congressional maps that were eventually struck down in the Callais ruling.

“This is a decision on who gets to serve on a school board, who gets to serve on a city council, who gets representation in the judiciary,” Lewis said.

Electoral maps are typically redrawn every 10 years after a census, but the Trump administration has encouraged Republican-led states to redraw districts to favor the GOP, a controversial move that has prompted some Democratic-led states to retaliate with gerrymandering of their own.

“But after 2030, I think we’re definitely going to see the impact of the Callais decision at the state level,” said Travis Crum, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis whose research focuses on voting rights, race and federalism.

Effects across the South

Critics of the ruling say it will fundamentally dilute the voting and governing power of Black and other minority citizens up and down the ballot, particularly in the South. There, many of the seats held by Black elected officials are in so-called opportunity districts that were created after the Voting Rights Act to allow Black and other minority voters to elect their preferred candidates.

“On the congressional level, we’re in this race to the bottom of redistricting, but when it comes to the state legislative level, we’ll have to wait and see,” Crum said.

In 10 state legislatures across the South, Republicans could gain more than 190 seats currently held by Democrats, most of them Black representatives in majority-minority districts, according to an analysis released in December by voting rights groups Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matter Fund. At the federal level, one analysis from The New York Times found that Democrats stand to lose a dozen U.S. House seats across the South.

In the hours after the Supreme Court ruling, Republicans across the nation began calling for maps to be redrawn, particularly in states where courts had forced them to create districts where Black or other racial minorities made up the majority of residents.

A US Supreme Court ruling hammered voting rights. What does it mean and what happens now?

“These lines should all be colorblind. You should never be basing a decision on race,” said Arizona Republican state Sen. Warren Petersen, who’s president of the state Senate and running for attorney general.

He told Stateline he believes both congressional and state legislative maps should be redrawn in Arizona — even if it takes litigation.

Mississippi Republican Gov. Tate Reeves called a special legislative session set for later this month, when he wants lawmakers to draw new election maps for Mississippi state Supreme Court districts. A federal judge in Mississippi will have to quickly decide whether to adopt a new map for some special elections scheduled for November.

Democrats, too, took action. In Illinois, lawmakers backtracked on a proposed constitutional amendment that would have directed lawmakers to consider race in drawing district lines, a provision taken directly from the Voting Rights Act. Instead, Illinois Senate President Don Harmon, a Democrat, told Capitol News Illinois that lawmakers want to learn more about the ruling before putting such an amendment on a ballot for voters to decide, to prevent unintended consequences that could undermine voting rights.

In many states, Republicans are focusing first on congressional redistricting. Louisiana Republican Gov. Jeff Landry postponed his state’s U.S. House primaries even though absentee voting has already begun. In Alabama, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey called a special state legislative session aiming to move the state’s May 19 primary in at least a handful of districts. Prominent Georgia Republicans were also calling for their state’s political maps to be redrawn, though GOP Gov. Brian Kemp said in a statement that it’s too late to do that this year.

And in North Dakota, the ruling leaves a tribal redistricting case in limbo. Tribes had used Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to sue the state over a legislative district map the North Dakota legislature approved in 2021.

Gerrymandering for partisan advantage is legal at the federal level, though some states do have their own laws restricting or prohibiting it. In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is arguing the Supreme Court ruling invalidates voter-approved amendments that prevent the state from gerrymandering districts based on race or political party.

For most states, though, state officials can redraw maps explicitly to favor Republican voters, for example, so long as they don’t state their intention to disadvantage voters based on race.

‘Ripple like wildfire’

Critics of last week’s Callais ruling also worry it will rapidly erode the pipeline that has made it possible for Black and other minority candidates to get elected to office.

“Now, state legislatures can draw maps where they are picking their voters instead of their voters picking them,” said Lewis, the Louisiana commissioner. “They can dilute the power of Black and brown people serving in the state legislature, which means there’s fewer people to fight a congressional map” that pulls voting power away from minority communities.

He worries that if Black Democratic state lawmakers oppose their white Republican colleagues in legislatures with GOP majorities, those colleagues could redraw maps to eliminate the Black lawmakers’ seats, claiming they’re doing it only for partisan reasons.

The diluting of minority voting power, he said, “is going to ripple like wildfire.”

At the most local level, city councils and county boards typically draw those voting maps, but the ruling could be used to apply to them as well, said Crum, the law professor. 

Arizona is one of a handful of states where an independent commission, rather than the state legislature, determines both congressional and legislative districts. Outside of a court order, it can’t convene before the turn of the decade.

Petersen, the Arizona state senator, said he’s prepared to litigate if the state’s redistricting commission doesn’t take action to redraw districts that he said are unconstitutionally drawn. He doesn’t expect new maps before 2028, though.

“We’ve heard complaints from constituents that they don’t like the way their district was drawn,” he said. “We have some people here in Arizona that represent completely far-flung areas.

“I do think you’ll get a better outcome on some of these legislative districts” by removing race-based districting, he said.

Lawmakers in some states have tried to guard against the loss of federal protections by introducing their own state-level voting rights bills. Ten states have their own versions of the federal Voting Rights Act, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, Oregon, Virginia and Washington.

Lawmakers in at least 10 other states have introduced such bills this year alone: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Rhode Island and Vermont.

The new Supreme Court ruling doesn’t render those laws unconstitutional, said Crum.

“But people who are seeking to undermine those state Voting Rights Acts are certainly going to rely on some of the themes” of the recent ruling, Crum said. “You might see them try and replicate some of the moves the court made.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct that Maryland has a state-level voting rights law, which was enacted last week.

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

Republican lawmakers and candidates across the country have escalated their anti-Islam rhetoric in recent months, a strategy aimed at energizing voters by claiming without evidence that Muslim culture and religious tenets threaten American political values.

Political observers say Republicans are seizing on anti-Islamic sentiment to gin up enthusiasm among their voters as they head into the 2026 midterm elections. It’s been a successful campaign strategy in the past.

Aggressive enforcement tactics have soured many Americans on hard-line immigration policies, once a winning issue for conservatives, and GOP victories on abortion and transgender rights have blunted the electoral power of those issues.

Instead, GOP candidates in some of the highest-profile political races in the country are putting Islam and the nebulous threat of Shariah at the center of their campaigns.

Shariah is a religious code derived from the Quran and the teachings of Prophet Muhammad that addresses moral, spiritual and daily life for Muslims. But the term has become shorthand, in some conservative circles, for anything having to do with Islam or with Islamic extremism.

Critics say conservative politicians have made Muslims a political bogeyman in their fight to hang onto power. Muslims say the rhetoric misrepresents their values and endangers their communities.

“I worry this will harm freedom, which is the very value some of these politicians are claiming to protect,” said Mustafa Akyol, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. Akyol is Muslim, and his research focuses on public policy and Islam.

“To think that American Muslims, which make 1% of the whole population, can enforce Shariah or force it on other people, that’s a very exaggerated claim.”

Up and down the ballot, Republicans have spent about $12 million since last year on ads that negatively mention Islam, Muslims or Shariah, according to AdImpact, an ad tracking firm.

Former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Jay Mitchell, now running for Alabama attorney general, recently released a campaign ad inviting supporters of “radical Islam” to “Allah Akbar your butt all the way back to the Middle East.”

In Georgia, Republican state Sen. Greg Dolezal, a candidate for lieutenant governor, released an AI-generated campaign ad last month depicting Muslim people invading a suburban neighborhood. In a post on X sharing the video, he described Muslims as “invaders who would rather pillage our generosity than assimilate.”

Officials in Alabama and Oklahoma have quashed efforts by Muslim groups to expand into larger facilities after those proposed developments attracted the attention and ire of conservative politicians. And Florida’s Republican-dominated legislature this year enacted laws allowing a handful of state officials to designate certain groups as domestic terrorist organizations.

At the federal level, incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. John Cornyn released a $1.6 million political ad earlier this year that claims “radical Islam is a bloodthirsty ideology” and says “Shariah law has no place in American courts or communities.”

There’s even a Sharia-Free America Caucus in Congress, launched last December by Republican Texas Reps. Keith Self and Chip Roy. It currently has more than 60 members spanning 25 states, according to Self. He called it “a noble cause to save Western Civilization and fight back against the threat of Sharia” in a January press release.

Akyol, of the Cato Institute, likens the furor to the American panic over communism in the 1950s that culminated in Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s efforts to root out communist infiltration in the U.S. government and other spheres of power.

Those efforts “led to the crackdown on public freedoms in America like civil liberties, freedom of speech,” Akyol said. “Luckily that ended, but this seems like a McCarthyism 2.0 era where the issue now is not communism, but Islam.”

Years of legislation

Republicans say they’re responding to voter concerns and trying to preempt the possibility that religious or foreign political codes might creep into the U.S. legal system, jeopardizing free speech or due process.

Oklahoma state Sen. David Bullard is working with fellow Republican state legislators on a constitutional amendment that would bar courts and municipalities in Oklahoma from using any foreign law or religious code that would undermine the U.S. or Oklahoma constitutions. Similar efforts have been made this year in Arkansas, Missouri and other states.

Bullard said he’s heard from constituents who are concerned about a growing threat of other cultures “trying to forcefully usurp” American culture.

“Those are definitely Eastern ideas that don’t mix with Western culture, and the Constitution is created wholeheartedly on that Western culture concept,” he told Stateline.

He notes that his amendment doesn’t mention Shariah and does not single out Muslims.

Conservatives have been pushing similar state legislation for more than a decade. Since 2010, at least nine states have enacted laws aimed at preventing courts from enforcing foreign legal codes, including a 2014 constitutional amendment in Alabama.

When asked about examples of the kinds of instances he’s trying to prevent, Bullard cited a 2009 case in New Jersey in which a judge refused to give a woman a protective order after her husband repeatedly assaulted her, saying the husband was acting on his religious interpretation of Shariah. The ruling was overturned the following year.

“I think more and more people in Oklahoma are calling on us to protect them from that,” he said.

But even the most vocal proponents of anti-Shariah measures have struggled to explain how it could replace the American legal system or why more laws are needed to curb it. The establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution already prohibits the government from favoring one religion over another, or forcing adherence to a religious code.

Standing at a podium with a sign emblazoned with a line through the words “Sharia Law,” Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis conceded during a news conference earlier this month that there isn’t an immediate threat of Shariah becoming the basis for Florida law.

“Of course that won’t happen any time soon,” DeSantis said. “But the more that we’re able to do to protect against that, I think, is going to benefit Floridians for many, many years.”

Real-world worry

The Islamic Academy of Alabama has operated as a K-12 private school near Birmingham for nearly three decades. But in December, local leaders of a nearby suburb denied the school’s request to relocate to a larger facility there. Alabama U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a Republican who’s running for governor and who has railed against Islam on the Senate floor and social media, called for the school to move out of Alabama.

School officials declined Stateline’s interview request but said they remain focused on supporting the education, well-being and safety of their students and community. They’ve dropped their current relocation plans.

In Oklahoma, Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond — who is running for governor — elevated a proposed expansion by the Islamic Society of Tulsa into a political issue when he announced an investigation into its funding. City leaders later denied the society’s application; Muslim leaders responded by hosting a community open house at their Tulsa mosque to connect with the community and promote a better understanding of their faith.

And in Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is challenging Cornyn for the GOP nomination in the state’s Senate race, sued over the proposed development of a large Muslim-centric community north of Dallas. He called it a “radical plot to destroy hundreds of acres of beautiful Texas land and line their own pockets” and claimed it was unlawfully reserved only for Muslims.

Although the group initially advertised that sales would be limited to certain people, representatives for the development have since said it is open to anyone.

Shariah shorthand

While some lawmakers have made a distinction in their rhetoric between extremism and the Islamic faith, others have made sweeping, derogatory claims that denigrate and stereotype all Muslims.

Tuberville of Alabama has said: “Islam is not a religion. It’s a cult.” U.S. Republican Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee has said, “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” U.S. Rep. Randy Fine, a Florida Republican who’s cosponsoring an anti-Shariah bill in Congress, posted on X in February: “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”

While politicians have invoked fears of extremism in their public comments, Akyol said American Muslims are the ones who are most worried.

“If the people who govern your state define you like that, what may come next?” he said. “Maybe a legal step against you, or some fanatic who really believes in that can take his machine gun and attack you.”

Much of the Islamophobic messaging has gone unchecked by other conservatives, a marked departure from previous leadership. In 2001, a few days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, then-President George W. Bush visited a mosque in Washington, D.C., and met with Muslim community leaders, declaring “Islam is peace” and condemning retaliation against Muslim Americans.

Earlier this month, DeSantis signed a Republican-sponsored bill into law that allows a few state officials to label certain groups “domestic terrorist organizations.” The new law also bans Florida courts from enforcing religious laws and bars state funds from going to schools affiliated with groups designated as terrorist organizations. It does not specifically mention a religion, but cites Shariah as an example of the kind of religious laws it covers.

“You can have these groups that may not be waging physical war-type jihad,” DeSantis said earlier this month. He warned groups could wage “stealth” or “financial” attacks.

“To me, that’s still jihad and we’ve got to stop it, and this bill provides the structure to be able to do it.”

Critics say such laws also have the potential to harm any organization that finds itself at odds with a current administration.

“That is the danger of these laws, because they are specifically designed to silence political dissent,” said Wilfredo Ruiz, communications director at the Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a national Muslim civil rights group. CAIR was one of two groups labeled as terrorist organizations by an executive order DeSantis issued in December.

The Biden administration criticized CAIR for statements made by its leadership after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel, but the group denies that it supports terrorism.

CAIR Florida sued over DeSantis’ order, arguing it violated the group’s First Amendment right to free speech. In March, a federal judge blocked the order.

Ruiz said his organization has the resources to continue challenging such laws in court. But he said he worries about smaller groups, including those that aren’t Muslim but might be at risk of being declared a “terrorist group” by whoever is currently in power in Florida.

“Having that executive power with the capacity to name you a terrorist organization before you have been even accused criminally, much less convicted, this is an openly unconstitutional proposal.”

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

In late March, a handful of Black faith leaders gathered on the steps of the Alabama State House to protest a bill that could allow the state to seize control of the police force in the capital of Montgomery.

Supporters of the Republican-sponsored proposal cast it as a response to Montgomery’s police officer shortage and public concern over unchecked crime.

Opponents called it a power grab aimed at a Democratic-led, majority-Black city, pushed by Montgomery’s white Republican state senator over the objections of the city’s mayor, police chief and its other state senator, a Black Democrat who represents a larger swath of the city.

“We’ve seen this before. This is nothing new,” Richard Williams, lead pastor of Metropolitan United Methodist Church in Montgomery, told reporters and others gathered for the news conference. The bill “empowers the state to remove elected Black officials from their operational control of the Montgomery Police Department.”

The following day, the Alabama Senate’s Republican supermajority shut down any debate on the bill and approved it. Kirk Hatcher, Montgomery’s Black state senator, and other Democrats were not allowed to speak on the Senate floor until after it passed. The measure now awaits a vote in the House.

Similar efforts have played out in recent years in other states — including Missouri, Mississippi and Tennessee — as Republican lawmakers push for state takeovers of police departments and other municipal agencies in Democratic cities that often have significant Black populations.

Conservative lawmakers frame their proposals as necessary for improving public safety or financial accountability. Critics say the takeover efforts undermine democracy by overriding local control, exceeding the traditional bounds of state power while perpetuating racist stereotypes.

Many of the nation’s big cities with the highest murder rates are located in Republican-led states but are governed by Democrats — a dynamic that fuels tension between state and local leadership.

“It’s frustrating for the citizens of Montgomery whenever they’re the victims (of crime) and their neighbors are victims,” Alabama Republican state Sen. Will Barfoot, who represents a slice of Montgomery, told fellow legislators on the Senate floor in March. “You know that at the very least that it’s partially because Montgomery doesn’t have the law enforcement officers that they need.”

Barfoot did not respond to Stateline’s request for comment.

The Montgomery Police Department hasn’t publicly released its staffing figures. Barfoot said on the floor that while he hadn’t been able to get those numbers, he estimated the department has around 220-230 officers, which he said falls short of the roughly 400 it would need to be staffed effectively.

In Missouri, Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe put the St. Louis police department under the control of a state-appointed board last year. Kansas City, Missouri, is the only other major city police department under state control. That arrangement dates from 1939, when the state assumed authority to combat corruption.

In 2023, Mississippi’s white Republican supermajority gave the state-run Capitol Police expanded jurisdiction over the state capital of Jackson, which has been called the “Blackest City in America,” and created separate appointed courts for the affluent, whiter parts of the city.

In Tennessee, state lawmakers are trying to create a state-controlled tourism board to oversee millions in surplus cash generated by Nashville. It’s the latest in a line of moves by the Republican-controlled state legislature to exert more influence in Democratic-led Nashville, including over its metro council, airport authority, electrical utility, and even its sports authority.

“Society is collectively tolerating the loss of democracy in these limited pockets,” said Louise Seamster, a sociologist at the University of Iowa whose research has focused on politics and urban development. “They don’t understand it’s going to come for them eventually.”

Echoes of division

The state-local power struggle over the St. Louis police department dates to the eve of the Civil War. White secessionist leaders in Missouri took control of the St. Louis police to keep its officers from fighting against the Confederacy. Kansas City’s arrangement dates back to post-Civil War Reconstruction, when state lawmakers were trying to limit Black political influence and civil rights gains. Kansas City briefly regained control in 1932 before the state reasserted itself seven years later.

At the time of Reconstruction, the growth of Black governance was seen as a major threat to white political power at the local and state levels, Seamster said.

“All kinds of political arrangements, up to legalized and unsanctioned violence, were carried out to reset things to what white people in power thought was the norm, which was them in charge,” she said.

Fast-forward to the Obama era: In a 2012 ballot initiative, Missouri voters overwhelmingly approved returning control of the St. Louis police department to the city.

But Republican state lawmakers tried in 2023 to repeal the measure, claiming St. Louis’ leaders at that time couldn’t decrease crime on their own. The effort failed after a nine-hour Democratic filibuster.

GOP lawmakers got it passed in 2025 with the backing of Kehoe, who’d made the effort a priority of his first year in office. He said state control would give law enforcement the tools it needed to combat high crime rates.

Missouri Democrats, noting that crime rates were decreasing, called the measure racist; Black Democrats held the city’s major offices at the time.

St. Louis has one of the highest homicide rates in the nation, though police officials said their data shows the murder rate dropped to its lowest level in two decades during the first three months of 2025.

In Michigan, researchers found, financial stress alone didn’t explain municipal takeovers. Residents’ race and economic status, as well as a city’s reliance on state funding, were better predictors of state intervention, according to a 2021 study from University of Michigan researchers.

“Black communities show signs of being successful or having access to resources that might increase their autonomy or ability to develop,” said Seamster, who has studied city-state conflicts over resources. “Then it is often a trend where, formally or informally, white communities step in to take it back.”

In 2019, the Republican-led Georgia state legislature tried to take over operation of the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, one of the busiest in the world, citing concerns over safety and corruption. Atlanta City Hall had been embroiled in a sprawling corruption scandal that eventually resulted in federal charges against multiple city staffers.

Then-Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms denounced the move as an “act of war” against the Democratic city, long a national hub of Black culture and business.

Many of the cities targeted for state intervention struggle with the kind of persistent poverty and structural disadvantages that contribute to higher crime rates.

Cities’ finances and power get siphoned away in myriad ways, Seamster said, from reduced state financial support or required power-sharing with a larger county, to more subtle changes, such as state decisions on how federal block grant funding is distributed that give cities less to work with.

Taking back power

Baltimore regained control of its police department last year after voters twice approved a ballot measure in the wake of a decade-long fight for local control. The police department had been under some form of state control since the Civil War.

Lifelong resident Ray Kelly became interested in the issue when a student in his community was arrested. He soon learned that to lobby for changes in the department, he’d have to leave Baltimore for the state capitol in Annapolis, nearly an hour’s drive south.

“Accountability starts at home, so the first place we naturally think we should go if we have an issue in our community is to our local representative,” he said, “and for 160 years the local representative had no authority, so it was like banging your head against the wall.”

Kelly is now executive director of the Citizens Policing Project, a nonprofit that was part of a coalition of Maryland organizations that worked for years to get the ballot initiative passed.

In the year since Baltimore gained control of its police, the Baltimore City Council has been holding regular public hearings on public safety.

They’re “packed,” Kelly said, adding that one hearing had such a huge turnout that both the hearing room and the overflow room were full, with even more residents standing outside to listen.

Kelly counts that as one visible and positive result of getting local control restored.

“The ultimate goal is to have local people be able to shape how the operations of the police department happen on a day-to-day basis, and not have to travel all the way to Annapolis to do it,” he said.

“People will be more involved as they learn we don’t have to write the state senator anymore, and we can just go to City Hall.”

Missteps and breathing room

Barfoot, the Alabama Republican state senator who represents a portion of Montgomery, told lawmakers he’s gotten more calls and messages about his bill proposing a takeover of the Montgomery police department than any other piece of legislation in his eight years in office.

Most of them have been supportive, he said.

Montgomery citizens, he said on the Senate floor, are “tired of turning on the news and hearing about the violence that we’ve had here in Montgomery. We’re tired of having the thefts that are occurring. We’re tired of having the robberies, the home invasions. And believe me, that is across Montgomery.”

He pointed to other large cities in Alabama that he said had a much higher number of officers per 1,000 residents than Montgomery, and criticized the city for going through five different police chiefs in the past seven years.

Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed and Hatcher say Barfoot never consulted them before introducing the bill. Barfoot acknowledged those “missteps” on the Senate floor, but said he’d since held a public hearing and said those leaders didn’t reach out to him, either. The current police chief spoke against the bill before lawmakers.

Montgomery leaders say the bill unfairly singles out their city. As written, it applies only to Montgomery and Huntsville, a Republican-led city. It would give law enforcement in those cities five years to have a certain number of police officers per resident before the state steps in.

After Huntsville leadership approached lawmakers with concerns about the bill, sponsors lowered the staffing requirements to 1.9 officers per 1,000 residents to give Huntsville some “breathing room,” Barfoot told local media. Huntsville now meets the requirements.

But Montgomery is about 150 officers short of the bill’s mandate, Barfoot estimated. If it doesn’t hire the required number of officers within five years, the state can take over and charge the city for filling those vacancies.

Williams, the Montgomery pastor, called that restitution clause a “financial weapon.”

After the Senate passed the bill, Hatcher chastised his Republican colleagues for withholding resources from people who need it and voting against public safety measures that law enforcement wants. An Alabama law enacted in 2022 allows gun owners to carry a handgun without a permit, background check or safety training.

“What I’ve come to believe is that when everybody around you has everything they need, that’s the safest we will be,” Hatcher said. “When people have health care, when people have food, SNAP benefits, that’s the safest we’ll be.”

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.