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.

Trump’s National Guard deployments and funding pressures should be viewed as two components of the same strategy, said Jill Habig, founder and CEO of the Public Rights Project, a nonpartisan legal firm that worked with local governments on the lawsuit against the three federal agencies.

“I view them as all of a piece with this administration’s effort to turn every aspect of feder