Bring Us Your ... Welfare-Dependent?
October 2, 2019
WASHINGTON – Today the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the Trump administration in a lawsuit over its newly-issued rule directing officials not to grant lawful permanent resident status to foreign nationals who receive public assistance or are likely to do so. The State of New York and other plaintiffs brought the suit in Manhattan federal district court, seeking a preliminary injunction against the rule’s operation.
By statute, prospective immigrants likely to become public charges are to be denied lawful permanent resident status. The new rule implementing this statute supersedes earlier guidance dating from 1999 that substantially watered down traditional public charge criteria, even exempting non-cash benefits, such as food stamps, from being considered “public assistance†at all. Plaintiffs attempt to make this Clinton-era departure the new standard, claiming that the Trump administration was arbitrary and capricious when it included non-cash assistance in the public charge calculus. But, as IRLI shows in its brief, from earliest times the United States has excluded immigrants likely to become public charges, and, up until 1999, non-cash benefits were treated as public assistance by officials implementing the public charge exclusion.
https://www.irli.org/single-post/2019/10/02/Bring-Us-Your-Welfare-Dependent
