The Trump administration on Thursday revived a policy that gives immigration officers wide authority to deny green cards to people they deem likely to rely on public assistance, a significant change that could deter hundreds of thousands of immigrants from using such programs.
The shift, which comes amid the Trump administration’s escalating efforts to curb both lawful and unlawful immigration, was swiftly denounced by immigrant advocates for discouraging families from seeking food stamps or housing vouchers they qualify for, potentially hurting their U.S.-born children. The move could effectively require them to choose between using safety net programs to meet basic needs and risking rejection for permanent resident status.
The Trump administration first moved to restrict green cards for people receiving public assistance during the president’s first term. But those efforts were met with legal challenges and later reversed by the Biden administration.
Federal law has long barred immigrants from obtaining green cards if they are likely to become a “public charge,” or primarily dependent on the government for subsistence. Immigration officers have historically considered the use of cash assistance programs or institutionalized long-term care, but not the use of other benefits like food stamps or Medicaid.
In its final rule, the Trump administration said it was rescinding a Biden-era regulation that “straitjackets” officers by formally limiting the public benefits they could consider before deeming someone a public charge.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a social media post that it was “restoring the basic principle that immigrants must be able to support themselves. We are reaffirming the requirement of self-reliance, protecting public resources, and ending policies that encouraged dependency on hard-working American taxpayers.”
Yet the rule is vague about which public benefits might lead officers to reject a green card applicant.
In 2018, when the Trump administration proposed expanding the grounds for public-charge exclusions, federal officials broke with longstanding precedent by trying to make the usage of benefits like food stamps or nonemergency Medicaid potential deal breakers for those seeking green cards. In 2021, the Biden administration revoked the Trump administration’s rule and later finalized a rule that immigrants could not be denied green cards based on their usage of most noncash government benefits.
With the new policy on Thursday, the Trump administration effectively restored those categories of assistance as potential grounds for exclusion. But the rule envisions “empowering” officers to make “highly individualized, fact-specific, case-by-case” determinations without offering a clear rubric for what might guide those judgments.
In its rule, the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged that it could lead many immigrants to withdraw from benefits programs in which they are currently enrolled, causing spillover crunches for hospitals and nonprofits that participate in Medicaid. The department estimated that the policy could result in about 950,000 people choosing to disenroll from, or forgo enrollment in, public benefits programs.
“This new rule puts a dagger in the heart of legal immigration,” Jeff Joseph, the president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said in a statement. He accused the Trump administration of replacing a system of clear guidelines “with uncertainty and broad discretion that risks arbitrary decision-making without accountability, further undermining confidence in our immigration system.”
Sarah Krieger, senior policy counsel at the National Immigration Law Center, an advocacy organization, said she worried that the new rule would hurt families, who may decide to forgo assistance programs that support “their health, their food security, and their housing stability.” That could include immigrant households with U.S. citizen children who qualify for federal benefits, she said.
“This confusion is certainly going to harm our communities and cause more people to decide to opt out of things that they’re eligible for,” Ms. Krieger said.
The new rule is set to go into effect on Sept. 18, according to a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services statement.
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