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President Trump published new policies for legal immigrants seeking green cards Monday, making it harder for them to be approved for the cards if they use or qualify for Medicaid, food stamps and other social safety net programs.
Two Bay Area counties, San Francisco and Santa Clara, have since sued the Trump administration over the change. California Governor Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Xavier Becerra also denounced the Trump administration’s move.
“We will not stand idly by while this Administration targets programs that children and families across our state rely upon,” Becerra said. “We are ready to take legal action to protect the rights of all Californians.”
The White House proposed the new rules by arguing they are intended to deny green cards to immigrants seeking U.S. benefits.
Also this week, Ken Cuccinelli, the Trump administration’s Acting Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, went viral for an NPR Morning Edition interview clip in which he rewrote an 1883 poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty, titled “The New Colossus.”
“Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge,” Cuccinelli said Tuesday.
Cuccinelli’s specific use of the term “public charge” is more than pithy, it relates directly to the new policy his agency will be tasked with carrying out. Under the new regulation, legal immigrants into the United States could be denied permanent residency if immigration authorities deem them “likely at any time to” enroll in any number of public benefits for more than a year.
As CalMatters reported earlier this week, the term “public charge” has never been formally defined, but the federal government has used it to describe people who are primarily dependent on the government for subsistence.
“We want to see people coming to this country who are self-sufficient,” Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, told the Associated Press. “That’s a core principle of the American dream. It’s deeply embedded in our history, and particularly our history related to legal immigration.”
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