The prospect of hardline immigration enforcement by the incoming Donald Trump administration is growing with each passing day. As The Intercept has reported, the formal transition team for the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement is full of lobbyists for blue chip surveillance contractors and architects of intrusive DHS programs that racially profile people of color.

Trump’s plans for an immigration enforcement surge have been met with resistance from the California state legislature, as well as the mayors of so-called sanctuary cities such as Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Oakland, and elsewhere. On the campaign trail, Trump threatened to cut off federal funding for sanctuary cities that defied federal immigration enforcement efforts. There are over three hundred such cities around the country.

Despite incoming California Attorney General Xavier Becerra’s challenge to Trump’s team to “come at us” over immigration enforcement, and the state legislature’s ongoing efforts to bolster legal representation for people in deportation proceedings and restrict law enforcement cooperation with ICE, local law enforcement in California is decidedly apprehensive about confronting the feds.

One of the programs local police fear will suffer from any cutoff of federal funding or cooperation is the Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Taskforce, a hallmark of American law enforcement’s efforts to fight drug trafficking and transnational crime. Established in 1982, currently more than half a billion dollars in OCDETF funding is disbursed to nine regions throughout the country to cover the costs of joint federal-local investigations and prosecutions of entities such as Mexican drug cartels, street gangs, the Italian Camorra, and the Russian mob. It is the centerpiece of the federal war on drugs.

One veteran California police officer from a sanctuary city who has worked on dozens of joint-federal task forces over the years said he feared the consequences of losing OCDETF funding and manpower. “I don’t think people understand what it would mean to cut off federal assistance,” the officer said. “I’d lose all my OCDETF funding, my investigative assistance, all the resources we use to go after seriously bad dudes.”

Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California-Irvine and an expert in both constitutional law and federal practice, told The Intercept in an email that cutting recalcitrant cities off from federal assistance would be a difficult, but feasible prospect.

“The question is whether the Trump administration and Congress are going to condition federal funds on cities cooperating with federal immigration authorities. If so, this will be challenged in the courts,” Chemerinsky wrote. “But there is no doubt that such heavy-handed tactics would seriously hinder cooperation between federal and state law enforcement authorities.”