Attorney General Matt Plotkin is hoping to show the human side of the federal funding cuts by touring the Boys and Girls Club in Newark earlier today to call attention to the Trump administration's decision to freeze billions of dollars administered by the U.S. Department of Ed, including nearly $160 million New Jersey typically gets for after-school, summer, and other programs.

Plotkin is part of a lawsuit aiming to block the cuts, which he and other advocates say will cause harm to students and force programs to shutter.

Senior Correspondent Joanna Gagis was there.

I want to become a pediatric orthodontist.

I'm taking a step forward and I'm moving into going to the army tomorrow.

So this is officially my last day here and I've grown so much since I've been here.

I've met so many different people.

These are just a handful of the 60,000 young people who spend their summers and their after-school hours at one of the many Boys and Girls Clubs around New Jersey.

They gathered today with New Jersey's Attorney General and others to share their stories and to highlight the fact that funding for the programs that have changed their lives is in jeopardy.

Without the Boys and Girls Club, there's a lot of things in me that wouldn't have come out the right way.

I feel like, and I can speak on behalf of all our teens, we all go through things in our home life, in Newark, being kids in an inner-city community, and I feel like being able to go somewhere after school like that was mentioned before where you know it's safe and you know that you can go there and you can have fun and you can learn things that most kids aren't learning.

Families here pay $125 a month for their kids to attend.

That's because federal funding has subsidized many of the programs, not just here at the Boys and Girls Clubs, but at similar programs like the YMCA and others around the state and nation.

But that funding was frozen by the Trump administration earlier this summer, even though it's already been approved by Congress.

I just don't understand how you could look at what's happening here and say this isn't exactly what we want to support, that we should be talking about doubling, tripling, quadrupling the amount of support we give to it, not illegally freezing the funds.

New Jersey lost $158 million out of a total $6 billion in the Department of Education funding that was frozen.

New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin is leading a coalition of 24 states, all with Democratic leadership, in suing the administration for what he calls a morally indefensible attempt to undermine our best-in-the-nation education system.

Anytime you take that kind of money out of the system, it's going to affect kids and families and people like this.

And I wanted people to see that this isn't waste, fraud, and abuse.

This is real people being hurt by illegal actions.

The funding allows students to maintain academic instruction during the summer months and be introduced to STEM and other job readiness programs that set them up for success.

For example, a college-level coding program called SWIFT that middle schoolers are learning here.

We launched our app incubator last year where we take members and introduce them to SWIFT UI and give them a platform in order to pitch their idea and hopefully develop it until it gets on the app store.

We also are building a robotics club so to give them the opportunity to get outside of the club and go to other places and compete and learn new things about like engineering and potentially turn it into a career somewhere.

We did an app through coding as well too.

It's a health fitness app that will be released very soon.

So it's about learning the basics but also how do we tie in the career and workforce opportunities as well too.

These advocates say without the funding for this program, these students not only lose academic opportunities but they become susceptible to engaging in risky behavior, even illegal activity.

We have national data that tells us through the America After 3 reports and through all the data that comes from Boys and Girls Clubs National about how during the hours of 3 to it's really 7, how youth are more likely to get involved in the juvenile justice system, how they are more likely to again engage in risky behaviors with alcohol and with drugs and things like that.

And so when they have this safe place to go like Brushes and the young ladies just said here, that means that this is part of the prevention, right, of those issues.

It's just something that keeps us well-rounded and also reminds us that even though we live in Newark, Newark is not the end and there are so many opportunities out there that we can achieve.

The lawsuit is seeking an injunction to unfreeze the funds that these programs so desperately need.

In Newark, I'm Joanna Gaggis, MJ Spotlight News.

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