Joe Biden’s administration wants more legal immigrants hooked on government largess so they’ll continue to vote for Democrats.
According to the Washington Times, the Department of Homeland Security has released a proposal that will make it “more attractive for immigrants to sign up for welfare,” an action that comes a few days before the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear a legal challenge that seeks to restore stricter rules put in place during former President Donald Trump’s term.
The proposal seeks to raise the bar for becoming a “public charge,” and joining programs like Medicaid would not be counted against most immigrants.
The worst DHS secretary in the history of the department, Alejandro Mayorkas, said that immigrants “will not be penalized for choosing to access the health benefits and other supplemental government services available to them.”
The proposal, announced late last week, tries to unwind a Trump-era policy that pressured immigrants to pay their own way.
That policy goes before the Supreme Court on Wednesday.
“While America is indeed the land of opportunity, it’s not the land of the welfare state,” Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich told the outlet.
He is leading the defense of the Trump-era rules since the Biden regime has refused to do so. As he has when it comes to defending all of Biden’s open-border policies, Mayorkas claims that the stricter rules are “not consistent with our nation’s values,” which is a lie since ‘our nation’ not only wants our borders enforced but most Americans are done with mass immigration, according to all major polling on the issue for years.
“Federal law has allowed the government to block immigrants likely to become public charges as far back as 1882. Immigration records from the early 1900s show that about half of would-be immigrants stopped at entry in any given year were rejected on the grounds of public charge,” the Times reported, noting that it’s not clear a state has the authority to manage the case, which is what the Supreme Court will rule on.
“Congress has updated the law several times, most recently in 1996 to encourage immigrants to prove they are self-sufficient,” the outlet added.
What is at issue is the definition of “public charge,” which, for some reason, is not defined in the statutes, leaving Democrat and Republican administrations to differ over it.
“The Clinton administration drafted tentative guidance in 1999 that was relatively permissive toward immigrants’ use of welfare. The guidance penalized immigrants chiefly for using cash programs such as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families or Supplemental Security Income,” said the Times.
“Two decades later, the Trump administration said the law demanded a stricter approach and released a formal regulation in August 2019 that covered non-cash welfare such as food stamps, Medicaid benefits and housing assistance. Immigrants found to be using those programs could be penalized in applications to become lawful permanent residents — the key stop on the path to citizenship,” the paper added.
Lawsuits ensued, of course, and the Trump administration lost in lower courts, though it was appealing the decisions.
When Biden came into office, his administration used the lower court rulings to justify tossing Trump’s rules while at the same time declining to defend them in courts, in the words of one appeals court judge, “ensuring not only that the rule was gone faster than toilet paper in a pandemic, but that it could effectively never, ever be resurrected, even by a future administration.”
Brnovich asked federal courts to be allowed to defend the Trump-era rules, but the 9th Circuit refused; now SCOTUS will decide.
For good measure, Biden’s solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, will be on hand to ask the justices not to allow Arizona to take up the defense of the old rules because the plan, of course, is to ensure more American taxpayers are taking care of more immigrants at a time when they are having more trouble taking care of their own families.
Is it 2024 yet?
