Trump prevails on migrant rules

Justices side with aid policy

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to put in place new rules making it easier to deny immigrants green cards or admission to the country because they might use food stamps, Medicaid or housing vouchers.

While court challenges will continue, the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling means that immigrants applying for permanent residency must now show they wouldn’t be burdens to the country — or in legal terms, public charges.

Neither the majority five conservative justices nor the liberals explained their reasoning. Their order reversed a ruling from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that had upheld a nationwide injunction imposed by U.S. District Judge George Daniels in New York.

An injunction in another case means the administration’s new regulations still cannot be applied in Illinois.

The new rules establish new criteria for who can be considered to be dependent on the U.S. government for benefits and thus ineligible for green cards and a path to U.S. citizenship. They were proposed to start in October but have never been imple

mented.

According to the new policy, immigrants who are in the United States legally and currently use public benefits, have at one time used public benefits, or are deemed likely to someday rely on public benefits would be suspect. The new criteria provide “positive” and “negative” factors for immigration officials to weigh as they decide on greencard applications. Negative factors include whether a person is unemployed, dropped out of high school or is not fluent in English.

Under the old rules, people who used noncash benefits, including food stamps and Medicaid, were not considered public charges.

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.

Opponents of the rule argue that punishing legal immigrants who need financial help endangers the health and safety of immigrant families — including children born in the U.S. who are citizens — and will foist potentially millions of dollars in emergency health care and other costs onto local and state governments, businesses, hospitals and food banks.

“The public charge rule is the latest attack in the Trump administration’s war on immigrants,” said Stephen YaleLoehr, 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.”

But federal officials say the rule ensures that immigrants can cover their own expenses in the United States without burdening taxpayers for food, housing and other costs. U.S. officials note that the change is not retroactive and exempts refugees and those who fled persecution for safety in the United States.

LOWER COURT RULINGS Daniels, the New York district judge, had sided with those who said the Trump administration’s proposed changes upend 130 years of how the “public charge” definition has been interpreted. Generally, the term was used to cover an individual “who is or is likely to become primarily and permanently dependent on the government for subsistence.”

Daniels declared the proposed change would be “repugnant to the American Dream of the opportunity for prosperity and success through hard work and upward mobility.”

Several judges imposed injunctions such as Daniels’, but two courts of appeals — the 9th, in San Francisco, and the 4th, in Richmond, Va. — overturned them, meaning that Daniels’ ruling was the one responsible for the nationwide injunction. Solicitor General Noel Francisco noted in his brief to the Supreme Court that the 9th Circuit “held that the rule ‘easily’ qualified as a permissible interpretation of the Immigration and Nationality Act.”

The Trump administration said the ruling by Daniels — and the appeals court ruling not to stay it — meant that “decisions by multiple courts of appeals have been rendered effectively meaningless within their own territorial jurisdictions because of a single district court’s nationwide injunctions, starkly illustrate the problems that such injunctions pose.”

Observers noted that the Trump administration won rulings in two appellate courts covering 14 states, but its policy could not take effect because of the ruling in the 2nd Circuit, which covers Connecticut, New York and Vermont.

The administration’s argument appeared to resonate with Justice Neil Gorsuch, who sided with the majority in the 5-4 ruling. In a separate opinion, Gorsuch urged his colleagues to confront the “real problem” of nationwide injunctions.

Noting that there are 94 judicial districts and 12 regional courts of appeal, Gorsuch suggested that plaintiffs only needed to win once in any of them to halt a federal policy, while the government faces “the long odds” of winning over all of them.

“What in this gamesmanship and chaos can we be proud of?” Gorsuch wrote in an opinion joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.

Challengers to the Trump administration, led by the state of New York in this case, said the new rule “is a stark departure from a more-than-century-long consensus,” and the status quo should remain until the legal challenges are decided.

Allowing the new rules, New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a brief to the court, would inject “confusion and uncertainty into immigration … and deter potentially millions of noncitizens residing in plaintiffs’ jurisdictions from accessing public benefits that they are legally entitled to obtain.”

Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security, praised the high court’s order.

“It is very clear that the U.S. 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.