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NEW YORK — Democratic-led states and cities filed lawsuits Monday challenging a federal rule set to begin Friday that they say gives President Donald Trump’s administration broad discretion to deny green cards to immigrants who rely on public assistance for food, healthcare, housing and other basic needs.
The lawsuits challenge the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s plan to revive a “public charge” rule the Republican originally imposed during his first term, only to have it reversed under his successor, Democratic President Joe Biden.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading a coalition of 21 other states in one of the suits, said the rule would force needy immigrant families to choose between seeking assistance and seeking legal status in the country.
“This rule preys on that fear and counts on families forfeiting the food assistance, healthcare coverage, and other public benefits to which they are legally entitled,” she said Monday at a news conference in City Hall alongside New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and immigrant advocates.
Massachusetts is also involved in the legal challenge.
“The Trump Administration’s new public charge rule threatens to punish immigrants for lawfully accessing public benefits,” Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell said in a statement. “I will continue to hold them accountable for their unlawful actions and efforts to create fear and uncertainty around essential services while undermining the dignity of immigrants.”
California, Colorado, Hawaii, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico and Wisconsin are also among the states involved in the legal challenge.
Mamdani filed a separate suit with leaders of other U.S. cities, including Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle. He said the rule would have a “chilling effect” not just on immigrants seeking legal status but other residents of the nation’s largest city.
“The new public charge rule seeks to push immigrant families away from the programs that have kept people fed and healthy for decades,” the mayor said. “New Yorkers will be afraid to see a doctor or ask for help they are legally entitled to. That fear will not stop at the families that the federal government is targeting.”
The Homeland Security Department, which is named in the lawsuits, dismissed the dire warnings.
“Let’s get this straight, sanctuary states are terrified they will lose federal funds because hundreds of thousands of illegals and noncitizens might remove themselves from American welfare programs,” the agency said in a statement. “We’re shaking in our boots over this supposedly terrible outcome.”
The lawsuits, which were both filed in federal court in Manhattan, argue the forthcoming rule is “arbitrary and capricious,” exceeds the Department of Homeland Security’s statutory authority, and departs from the longstanding meaning of the federal government’s public charge provision.
Specifically, James said, the rule unlawfully gives immigration officials broad discretion to consider a wide range of public benefits when making their decisions on immigrants seeking legal status in the country.
She said the rule lets immigration officers count nearly any public benefit, used for any length of time, against a green card applicant — even if it’s a U.S. citizen family member who is taking advantage of the benefit.
That means a parent’s green card application could be at risk simply because their U.S. citizen child used state-provided health insurance or participated in a school’s free lunch program, James said.
“This new rule sweeps away more than a century of settled law to unlawfully broaden the definition of ’public charge’ in a way that Congress never intended,” added Steve Banks, the city’s corporation counsel.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta called the forthcoming rule a “cruel policy.”
Federal law already requires those seeking permanent residency or legal status to demonstrate that they will not become a public charge.
The Trump administration’s new rule does not describe or specify by name the benefits and programs that could be considered a public charge.
It simply says officers, “using good judgment and discretion,” will make “individualized, fact-specific public charge inadmissible determinations, based on a totality of the alien’s circumstances.”
Associated Press reporters Sophie Austin in Sacramento, Calif. and Cybele Mayes-Osterman in Chicago contributed to this story.
The Light contributed reporting.
When migrants come to the US, going through the process, are they hosted and supported by family? Does the receiving family have to support them for the years prior their citizenship.
How can an American born citizen be working 27 years private industry get laid off 2011 then works in NBPS almost 2 yrs gets laid off in 2013 due to city cuts and does receive unemployment, for a back up of 11 weeks. Now your stating non citizens are getting assistance! What happened to illegals don’t get assistance! Illegals, not immigrants, theirs a difference. Immigrants can come on a green card or visa! That makes them legal!
Of course they shouldn’t get benefits that legal residents don’t get.
100% disgusting, NB Light stop censoring comments that aren’t from the far left liberal lunatics. Like NB Light, Maura Healey, and Letitia James are all lost. Not everyone agrees with this liberal nonsense.
Behind every immigration debate is a human being, a mother, father, child, neighbor, or friend simply trying to build a safe and hopeful life.
No family should have to choose between putting food on the table, receiving needed healthcare, and pursuing a future with dignity and security. We can disagree about policy while still choosing compassion over fear and humanity over division.
As people of faith, may we remember that every person bears God-given dignity and is worthy of being treated with kindness, mercy, and respect.
May we never lose sight of the human faces behind the policies we debate.
Absolutely, but and there’s always a but, legal citizens have a right to such programs and many don’t qualify. So what makes it right for illegals to get benefits. If they are ILLEGAL it can be compared as to that ILLEGAL entering your home taking your food or your elderly parents food, or your children’s food. IF THEY ARE ILLEGAL, THEY DO NOT DESERVE ANY BENEFIT. Now enter legally and while you held entering legally, yes, because they are doing it the LEGAL way. However each person entering should have a American paying for them. Not out of you and my pocket out of there own pocket with no help from government assistance.
Thank you for this.
Like they say to get respect, you have to give respect For the good immigrants that have come to our country, contributed, and followed the laws we are grateful and say thank you. But for the undocumented illegals, that are here, and have been here for years and have done nothing to start the process to become illegal, it’s wrong. The state’s leadership and agencies are just as much at fault, they should have been helping them from day one to get their paperwork processed and become legal immigrants.(to get any form of aid, paperwork has to be processed) No one should be in this country if their undocumented.