SC allows enforcement of new green card rule
WASHINGTON, Jan 28, (AP): A divided Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to put in place new rules that could jeopardize permanent resident status for immigrants who use food stamps, Medicaid and housing vouchers.
Under the new policy, immigration officials can deny green cards to legal immigrants over their use of public benefits.
The justices’ order came by a 5-4 vote and reversed a ruling from the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in New York that had kept in place a nationwide hold on the policy following lawsuits against it.
The court’s four liberal justices, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, voted to prevent the policy from taking effect.
Federal appeals courts in San Francisco and Richmond, Virginia, had previously overturned trial court rulings against the rules. An injunction in Illinois remains in effect but applies only to that state.
The lawsuits will continue, but immigrants applying for permanent residency must now show they wouldn’t be public charges, or burdens to the country. The new policy significantly expands what factors would be considered to make that determination, and if it is decided that immigrants could potentially become public charges later, that legal residency could be denied. Under the old rules, people who used noncash benefits, including food stamps and Medicaid, were not considered public charges.
“The public charge rule is the latest attack in the Trump administration’s war on immigrants,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration expert at Cornell University’s law school. “It makes it harder for working class people to immigrate to or stay in the United States. This rule is another brick in the invisible wall this administration is building to curb legal immigration.”
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Roughly 544,000 people apply for green cards annually. According to the government, 382,000 are in categories that would make them subject to the new review.
Immigrants make up a small portion of those getting public benefits, since many are ineligible to receive them because of their immigration status.
In a separate opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch urged his colleagues to confront the “real problem” of socalled nationwide injunctions, orders issued by a single judge that apply everywhere. In this case, even though the administration won rulings in two appellate courts covering 14 states, its policy could not take effect.
“What in this gamesmanship and chaos can we be proud of?” Gorsuch wrote in an opinion joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.
Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security, praised the high court’s order. “It is very clear that the US Supreme Court is fed up with these national injunctions by judges who are trying to impose their policy preferences instead of enforcing the law,” Cuccinelli said.
Susan Welber, a Legal Aid Society lawyer who is among the attorneys for the plaintiffs, said she believes courts ultimately will invalidate the policy. “What’s sad is that the harm that’s done while the rule is in effect can’t be undone,” Welber said.
After the US Supreme Court upheld President Donald Trump’s ban on travelers from several predominantly Muslim countries in 2018, the ruling appeared to shut down legal challenges that claimed the policy was rooted in anti-Muslim bias.
But a federal appeals court in Richmond is set to hear arguments from civil rights groups hoping to keep the challenges alive.
The 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments Tuesday in three lawsuits filed by US citizens and permanent residents whose relatives have been unable to enter the US because of the travel ban, which was first imposed shortly after Trump took office in January 2017.
The court is being asked to decide whether a federal judge in Maryland made a mistake when he refused to dismiss constitutional claims made in a lawsuit filed by the International Refugee Assistance Project despite a 2018 US Supreme Court ruling in a Hawaii case that found the travel ban “a legitimate grounding in national security concerns.”
Effectively
The Justice Department argues the high court’s ruling effectively puts an end to the legal challenges. In a 5-4 ruling, a sharply divided Supreme Court found that the travel ban was within the considerable authority US presidents have over immigration and their responsibility for keeping the nation safe. The court rejected claims that the policy was rooted in anti-Muslim bias based in large part on Trump’s own tweets and public statements, including his call during the presidential campaign for “a complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
Trump has said the ban is aimed at making the US safer from potentially hostile foreigners.
“The Court rejected the argument that the Proclamation could be explained only by anti-Muslim bias, and held instead that the Proclamation was rationally grounded in legitimate national-security concerns and foreign policy objectives,” Justice Department lawyers argue in a legal brief.
The Trump administration is asking the 4th Circuit to dismiss the lawsuits.
But the plaintiffs’ attorneys say the Supreme Court merely rejected a preliminary injunction to block the travel ban and did not decide the merits of the constitutional claims. The plaintiffs allege the travel ban violates several constitutional rights, including the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause prohibiting the government from favoring one religion over another.
“The Trump administration has supplied ample and damning evidence of its discriminatory intent, time and time again, so we’re hopeful that any court – any fairminded observer – will see it the way we do, that it is a Muslim ban that’s aimed at the Muslim community and Islam,’” said Gadeir Abbas, a senior litigation attorney with the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
Federal appeals courts – including the 4th Circuit had upheld rulings from federal judges who blocked the travel ban from taking effect. But the Supreme Court came to a different conclusion.
The travel ban’s third iteration – now in effect– applies to travelers from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. It also affects two non-Muslim countries, keeping out travelers from North Korea and some Venezuelan government officials and their families.