US judge blocks Trump’s health insurance rule for immigrants
WASHINGTON: A US federal judge on Saturday temporarily stayed a Trump administration order requiring immigrants to furnish proof they either have health insurance or can pay for it within a month of arriving.
The order, which was to go into effect on Sunday, would have mostly impacted poor immigrants coming in joining relatives already in the US, something the President Donald Trump has routinely derided as “chain migration”.
Judge Michael Simon of the US district court in Portland, Oregon, has schedule the next hearing in the case for November 22.
Doug Rand, an Obama White House immigration official, had told Hindustan Times in October, when the order was issued, some 23,000 Indians are likely to be impacted by the rule -not necessarily denied, but affected.
An estimated 35,000 family-sponsored immigrants are accepted by the US from India every year. Nearly a third of them are already here, in line for their Green Card, and the rest come from India.
This order was issued under the same authority that President Trump used to ban visitors from certain Muslim-majority countries.
“Immigrants who enter this country should not further saddle our health care system, and subsequently American taxpayers, with higher costs,” Trump had said in a proclamation in October.
A similar order impacting poor immigrants, called the “public charge” rule issued in August was intended to keep out immigrants who could end up on welfare programmes such as housing support and foods stamps.
President Trump has also signed off on a plan reducing the annual intake of refugees to 18,000 in 2020, from 30,000 - which had been the lowest since the modern resettlement program’s creation in 1980. In the last full year of the Obama administration, the refugee ceiling was 85,000. The administration had announced its plan to cut the intake to 18,000 in September.