Small Stride Academy has been caring for children in the Beverly neighborhood for about 40 years, but the day care center and preschool isn’t sure how it will keep its doors open if subsidies that help families afford child care in Illinois are cut.

More than half of the day care’s children benefit from subsidies from the Child Care Assistance Program, said center administrator Lisa Griffin. That program is partly funded by federal dollars that President Donald Trump’s administration said Tuesday night it plans to withhold from Illinois and four other states with Democratic governors over concerns about fraud and misuse of the money.

“It is going to be a problem,” Griffin said of the potential loss of dollars. “Families depend on us. Then you’re expecting this to trickle down to the parents’ employment. How could they not be affected if we weren’t open?”

Child care professionals, parents and local elected leaders expressed horror Wednesday after the federal government announced that it would freeze about $10 billion in funding for child care and family assistance programs in Illinois, California, Colorado, Minnesota and New York. About $1 billion is being withheld from Illinois, according to Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker’s office.

“Rather than making life easier and more affordable for our families, Donald Trump is stripping away child care from Illinois families who are just trying to go to work,” Pritzker said in a news release.

“Thousands of parents and children depend on these child care programs to help them make ends meet, and now their livelihoods are being put at risk,” Pritzker said. “This is wrong, it is cruel, and we will take every step possible to defend the kids and families depending on all of us right now.”

Illinois Action for Children, which is the largest administrator of the Child Care Assistance Program in Cook County, said in a statement Wednesday that funding delays and disruptions would have “immediate, harmful impacts on children and working families across the state of Illinois.” The organization said that the decision to freeze funds has created “fear and confusion” across the state.

The money is frozen in three areas: the Child Care and Development Fund, Social Services Block Grant funds and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

In Illinois, about 100,000 low-income, working families receive subsidized child care through the Child Care Assistance Program, which is partly funded by the Child Care and Development Block Grant, according to the governor’s office. The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grant helps to support thousands of child care providers throughout the state, according to the governor’s office. Nearly 10,000 families participate in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which is for families with children and pregnant women who need temporary financial assistance, according to the Illinois Department of Human Services.

The Social Services Block Grant goes toward hundreds of organizations statewide that support human service providers, according to the governor’s office.

The federal government said it decided to freeze the funds over concerns that “these benefits intended for American citizens and lawful residents may have been improperly provided to individuals who are not eligible under federal law,” according to a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services news release.

“Families who rely on child care and family assistance programs deserve confidence that these resources are used lawfully and for their intended purpose,” said Deputy U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Jim O’Neill in the release.

Pritzker’s office said the Trump administration hasn’t provided Illinois with any detailed information or evidence about any alleged fraud. His office accused the administration of targeting Illinois and the four other states because they’re led by Democratic governors. The Trump administration announced it was withholding the funding the day after Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who was the Democrats’ 2024 vice presidential candidate, ended his run for reelection as Trump intensely focused on fraud allegations in the state’s child care programs, as well as the Somali community.

Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement: “For too long, Democrat-led states and governors have been complicit and allowing massive amounts of fraud to occur under their watch. HHS identified serious concerns in these five states that warranted immediate action to prevent further potential misuse while reviews are underway.”

Child care professionals across Chicago, however, were alarmed by news of the freeze and wondered what it would mean for their businesses and the families that rely on them. Several said that if Child Care Assistance Program funds are cut, they might have to reduce their staff and may lose a lot of their families.

“I’m praying for all day care owners because everybody is on pins and needles right now and everyone is scared,” said Daphne Williams, director of Smarty Pants Early Learning Center in Bronzeville where about 40% of the children are in the program.

At Angels R Us Kidz Academy, also in Bronzeville, about 90% of the families are part of the Child Care Assistance Program, said Bernard Joiner, director of the center. If the subsidies are cut, “It will be a huge hit to our business,” Joiner said. The center might have to provide discounts and some families may no longer be able to afford it, Joiner said.

“There wouldn’t really be any other option for those parents other than trying to figure out how to stay at home, and if they’re at home they can’t work,” Joiner said.

Sabrina Oliver, director of Kids Are Us Learning Academy in South Shore, said if the center lowered its prices to help offset a loss of subsidies for families, it could be difficult to stay open. About 95% of the center’s children benefit from Child Care Assistance Program subsidies, Oliver said.

“It’s not right,” Oliver said of the frozen funds. “It really helps these parents. If they want to work, someone has to watch their child, and they need to have a safe environment, somewhere for them to go.”

Parent Varaneesala Rhodes said not only does the program help pay for child care for her three youngest children, but it also supports the center where she works as a teacher, Small Stride Academy in Beverly.

Without the subsidies, the cost of child care for Rhodes would exceed her income as a single parent. She also worries about the stability of her job if the center can no longer receive subsidies. She doesn’t anticipate being able to find a different job that would cover the costs of child care, rent and other expenses.

“When I got the news, I was like, ‘Oh shoot, what’s going to happen?’” Rhodes said. “It’s kind of scary.”

Like Pritzker, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Democratic lawmakers in the Illinois General Assembly decried the move by the Trump administration to strip federal funds from the state’s child care assistance apparatus.

Johnson on Wednesday said it was another example of Trump continuing “to abdicate his responsibility to the interests of working people.”

“These are the types of threats that this administration has put forward across the board since he’s been in office,” Johnson said at a City Hall news conference. “It’s going to be severe.”

State Rep. Joyce Mason, who chairs the House committee on Child Care Accessibility & Early Childhood Education, said the cuts will be devastating to families who benefit from some of these programs due to the exorbitant amount of money that won’t be available.

“I always try to give everybody grace and think that people are doing things for the right things (or) the right reasons,” said Mason, a Democrat from Gurnee. “In this case, Trump has shown time and time again that he is really just a cruel and vindictive, horrible excuse for a human. And I think that everything he does is politically-based. I don’t think he does anything in the best interest of the people of the country that he represents.”

State Sen. Li Arellano, a Republican who sits on the Health and Human Services Committee, said this federal funding needs to be protected and that he’d like to work with Pritzker and the federal government to address any concerns over whether the funds have sufficient oversight. But he criticized Pritzker’s office for accusing the Trump administration of playing politics with this issue.

“Your response isn’t immediately to call them out and pick a fight with them. Your response is, ‘All right, what do we need to do to get this addressed? What do we need to fix on our end? What is maybe a mistake on the state’s end and how can we get this fixed?’ And that’s the approach you take,’” said Arellano, a former mayor of Dixon. “And the problem with the governor’s approach is absolutely the opposite of that: He politicizes everything.”

Tuesday’s announcement from the Trump administration is part of a pattern of the Republican president targeting Pritzker and the rest of blue Illinois under motivations they claim to be nonpolitical.

The two have long been political archenemies going back to Trump’s first term, with Pritzker chiding Trump over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic while the president’s supporters have accused the Democratic governor of taking too strict of measures with COVID mitigations.

During the first year of Trump’s second term in office, Pritzker, who is running for a third term as governor and is considered a potential presidential contender in 2028, has raised his national profile in becoming one of Trump’s most ardent critics, something the president has taken notice of.

“And now I understand he wants to be president. But I noticed he lost a little weight, so maybe he has a chance, you know? You never know what happens,” Trump said in August of Pritzker when discussing the possibility of deploying National Guard troops to Chicago. “But Pritzker’s a gross incompetent guy.”

During Operation Midway Blitz, which saw an influx of federal immigration agents descend on the Chicago area to conduct mass deportation missions, Trump in October federalized 500 National Guard troops — 300 from Illinois and 200 from Texas — and deployed them to Illinois over Pritzker’s objections.

The president had previously discussed the possibility of sending Guard troops to Chicago to address violent crime, despite double-digit percentage drops in gun violence in the city over the last several years. Trump’s underlings later said the troops would be used to protect federal property and immigration agents in case they got into any clashes with violent demonstrators opposed to their presence.

In the end, Texas Guard troops were only deployed to the streets for one day while being stationed at a U.S. Army Reserve training center in Elwood, near Joliet. The Illinois Guard members were never sent out on any missions and have been spending a lot of time at a state-owned military installation about 75 miles southwest of Chicago.

And last month, the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court sided with Pritzker in denying a request from the Trump’s administration to allow him to deploy Guard troops to Illinois streets for the time being.

The Trump administration has also repeatedly used violence that has occurred on public transit systems to politically attack blue cities such as Chicago.

The administration threatened in early December to withhold up to $50 million in federal funding from the Chicago Transit Authority if it did not comply with a directive to improve security on buses and trains. In doing so, despite CTA crime being down along the city’s rail system, the administration invoked the apparently random attack against a 26-year-old woman who was set on fire while riding a Blue Line train in November.

In September, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wrote a letter to the CTA asking it to lay out plans to reduce crime and fare evasion on the system or risk losing funding. This was a few weeks after the apparently random fatal stabbing of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte, North Carolina train that was captured on video, a killing that sparked rhetoric about “Black-on-white-crime” over the internet and elsewhere and renewed old racist tropes about the Black community being a threat to white populations. The victim in the CTA Blue Line attack is also white and her alleged attacker is Black.

After Duffy’s September letter, the Trump White House did in fact freeze $2.1 billion in federal grant funding already awarded to the CTA, mostly for its long-awaited Red Line Extension project — but it did so citing the agency’s diversity requirements for contractors, not crime.

Last month, Trump’s Justice Department sued the executive director of the Illinois State Board of Elections, alleging the board’s refusal to release sensitive information on the state’s roughly 8.3 million registered voters violated federal civil rights law.

The legal challenge comes as Trump has repeatedly and erroneously insisted voter fraud kept him from being reelected in 2020 — and in each of his three presidential campaigns since 2016, he was soundly defeated in Illinois.

The 10-page lawsuit seeks a judge’s order instructing state election officials to release to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi “the current electronic copy of Illinois computerized statewide voter registration list, with all fields, including each registrant’s full name, date of birth, residential address, and either their state driver’s license number, the last four digits of their Social Security number” or other unique identifier.

The complaint, signed by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, argues the federal Civil Rights Act gives Bondi “the sweeping power to obtain these records,” which the Justice Department has said it needs as part of an investigation into the state’s compliance with federal elections laws.

The lawsuit was filed on the same day the Justice Department filed a similar complaint in federal court in Madison against the Wisconsin Elections Commission, as well as in Georgia and Washington, D.C., bringing the Justice Department’s nationwide total to more than 20 such lawsuits.

The Associated Press contributed.

Gorner reported from Springfield.