The Next Front in Trump’s War Against Immigrants

The administration’s changes to the public charge rule is another effort to make would-be citizens believe that any level of participation in civic life is going to bring the state down on them.

In the Trump administration’s avalanche of immigration animosity, it can be hard to miss some of the more technical changes to immigration policy, buried as they are in the broader news of masked agents shooting people and mass medical negligence in detention.

One such shift deserves more attention: the expansion of the so-called public charge rule, a concept dating back to the colonial era intended to restrict the arrival of immigrants deemed likely to become dependent on the state. Though public charge exists in federal law, it is not specifically defined, meaning that the executive branch has the leeway to define it. Many presidents including Bill Clinton have tried to redefine the rule, though none nearly as aggressively as Trump. The new regulation, which technically went into effect this month, allows adjudicators with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, to deny applications for green cards based on “receipt of any means-tested public benefit” while striking specific definitions for terms like “receipt (of public benefits),” instead giving its bureaucrats more latitude to interpret the terms as they see fit.

An assortment of states and cities have already sued to block the regulations. Litigation managed to stop a similar effort during Trump’s first term, in 2019, before the Supreme Court allowed it to go into effect in late January 2020, not ruling on its merits but instead against the use of a nationwide injunction by a district court to block it. This proved brief, as a lower judge blocked the rule again as the country went into Covid lockdowns in March, making it only effective for some two months. The Biden administration fully rescinded the rule in 2022. Yet the fact of its limited application did not make it a loss for Trump and Stephen Miller, credited with designing the rule along with the majority of the administration’s anti-immigrant framework. It was a significant victory in the narrative war and had long-lasting effects on immigrants’ trust in public benefits and services. The administration’s current effort to shape the public charge rule seeks to build on these previous........

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