A federal judge on Tuesday sided with a Baltimore nonprofit in its effort to restore tens of millions of dollars in environmental justice grants canceled by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

In a blow to President Donald Trump’s campaign against EPA programs targeted for poor, pollution-burdened communities, the Baltimore-based judge ordered the agency to restore a total of $180 million to Green and Healthy Homes, a Baltimore-based nonprofit focused on lead remediation and childhood asthma, along with two other nonprofits tapped to distribute environmental health grants around the country.

Green and Healthy Homes sued the EPA in April alongside nonprofits in Minneapolis and Seattle; each received $60 million in EPA grant funding for environmental work in their respective regions.

According to U.S. District Court Judge Adam B. Abelson, the EPA’s decision to axe these grants simply because they were for “environmental justice” was arbitrary and overstepped the agency’s legal authority.

For one, Abelson argued in his 48-page opinion, Congress had explicitly earmarked this money for “environmental and climate justice” under the Inflation Reduction Act. While the agency may have discretion to define what counts as a “disadvantaged community,” Abelson said it doesn’t have the authority to ignore a congressional mandate simply because it disagrees with the policy.

“Yet this is precisely what EPA has done here,” wrote Abelson, a Maryland judge appointed by President Joe Biden.

Green and Healthy Homes did not immediately comment on the ruling. EPA spokesman Mike Nye said the agency is reviewing the decision.

Over two hearings in recent months, Green and Healthy Homes attorney Joshua Auerbach argued the EPA created a “conveyor belt” to wipe out grants that the Trump administration didn’t like, using keyword searches to target environmental justice programs without basis or legal grounds.

Department of Justice attorney Molissa Farber, meanwhile, argued that the EPA was within its rights to shift priorities from one administration to the next. These decisions were far from arbitrary, she said at a late May hearing, since EPA officials canceled grants across the board, not selectively.

The Green and Healthy Homes lawsuit comes as Trump has curtailed the EPA’s focus on pollution in poor, often non-white communities that have historically felt the brunt of industrial impacts. In March, Administrator Lee Zeldin rolled out plans to eliminate “environmental justice” divisions across the EPA, while the agency has taken swift action to deplete staff and funding for low-income, polluted communities in the mid-Atlantic region.

The EPA had selected Green and Healthy Homes, the Minneapolis Foundation and the Seattle-based Philanthropy Northwest to manage a total of $180 million distributed evenly across their three regions. Part of the EPA’s “Thriving Communities Program,” the money flows from a larger pool of Inflation Reduction Act funding dedicated to environmental and climate work in disadvantaged communities.

These three organizations would provide grants to groups across their regions. Projects eligible for funding could address community cleanups, food access, air-quality monitoring, stormwater infrastructure and household health problems such as asthma, asbestos and lead contamination.

As of Feb. 20, Green and Healthy Homes had pledged grants to 63 organizations in the EPA’s mid-Atlantic region. That includes a dozen in Maryland, 13 each in Virginia and West Virginia, 17 in Pennsylvania, six in Washington, D.C., and two in Delaware.

Work by these organizations has been paused due to the cancellations, and Green and Healthy Homes reported at an initial hearing in April that it would have to eliminate three positions if funding was not immediately restored.

At the time the three organizations sued in April, the Trump administration had canceled $8 million in initial funding to stand up the programs and frozen another $52 million aimed at the groups. The EPA ultimately canceled the entire sum.

The three nonprofits received almost identical letters in February informing them that their funding had been canceled. Abelson said these form letters reflected decisions without any basis in individual analysis or justification for why these grants fell short of legal requirements.

The judge also balked at federal attorney’s argument, made at a recent hearing, that the EPA doesn’t have to spend money appropriated to it by Congress.

“In other words,” Abelson wrote in his opinion, “EPA contends that it has authority to thumb its nose at Congress and refuse to comply with its directives.”