Trump funding cuts hit San Diego legal nonprofit, Rady Children’s Hospital

The Trump administration’s sweeping cuts in federal funding for government agencies and nonprofits now threaten one of San Diego’s most prominent legal organizations that has fought on behalf of wrongly convicted people in state prisons. 

Last month, The Innocence Center was informed that the final portion of a $600,000 grant was being terminated. If it goes through it would represent as much as a 30% cut to the organization’s budget, said executive director Michael Semanchik. 

The Department of Justice has funded innocence work in San Diego through grants from the Office of Justice Program to the now defunct California Innocence Project since 2010, he said. 

“It will be a decent size hit to our budget,” he said. “Typically, what we use this award for and what it is meant for is to cover staff salaries and experts for case litigation.” 

The cut is among nearly 400 grants issued by OJP nationwide that were terminated in April, according to an accounting by the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C.

The council estimated the cuts total about $500 million to 221 organizations across the country. The aggregate value of the grants was approximately $820 million, but some grants were awarded over multiple years and some funds have already been spent. 

In San Diego, in addition to The Innocence Center, a $3.6 million grant to Rady Children’s Hospital was also cut. That money helped fund the Regional Children’s Advocacy Center at the hospital’s Chadwick Center for Children and Families.

The centers provide training and technical services to police, prosecutors and others in the child abuse field. Rady officials did not respond to inewsource’s request for comment.

The Innocence Center was founded in 2023 by the former leadership and staff of the now defunct California Innocence Project, which was launched in 1999 at the California Western School of Law. Over the years, more than 40 people have been exonerated of crimes they did not commit.

Semanchik found out the grant was being terminated on April 22, when federal officials sent notices to hundreds of organizations. The notice simply said that the award was being canceled because it no longer met the “program goals or agency priorities.” 

Those goals are now “more directly supporting certain law enforcement operations, combatting violent crime, protecting American children, and supporting American victims of trafficking and sexual assault, and better coordinating law enforcement efforts at all levels of government,” the notice said.

Semanchik said that his organization will file an appeal to attempt to restore the funding. “We’re exploring all of our options including filing an administrative appeal and working with the government to try to restore the funding,” he said. 

Still, Semanchik said the funding halt — the April 22 notice said the termination was effective immediately — is having an “significant” effect on the group. 

“We’re doing everything we can to try to backfill the lost funds, trying to identify private donors as well as local and state funding,” he said. “We’re looking to try to make up the difference so that we can keep operations going and keep working the cases we are in litigation on.”

The Innocence Center is not the only such organization whose funding was cut in April. The Great North Innocence Project in Minnesota also lost a similar $600,000 grant. 

Nearly $3 million was cut for grants that worked on wrongful convictions, according to a tally from the Council on Criminal Justice.