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New York is leading a 22-state lawsuit against the Trump administration for unlawfully expanding the “public charge” rules that restrict entry to the United States for immigrants deemed likely to make use of public benefits. A group of municipalities, led by New York City, is separately suing over the same rules.
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The new regulations, scheduled to go into effect September 18, reverse a set of 2022 rules that prohibited immigration officers from considering immigrants’ potential future use of non-cash public benefits—like food stamps, Children’s Health Insurance Program benefits, and Medicaid—when determining whether to grant visas. Under the rules scheduled to go into effect this week, officials can use an applicant’s need for food or medical aid to help determine grounds for inadmissibility.
In a report released this summer, health policy organization KFF estimated that between 1.4 million and 4.1 million Medicaid and CHIP enrollees in mixed-status households could disenroll out of fear. The cities and states suing over the rule change argue that it “throws out more than a century of settled law and decades of federal guidance and gives officers wide latitude to make decisions that are inconsistent and discriminatory,” representatives for New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani wrote in a news release.
Trump attempted to establish similar rules—sometimes described as a “wealth test for immigrants”—during his first administration. In 2020, as my colleague Noah Lanard reported, some mixed-status families were forced to choose between green cards and food for their children.
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The public charge rule was sometimes described as a plan for denying green cards to people who used public benefits programs like food stamps and Medicaid. The reality is that immigrants are rarely eligible for public benefits until they get a green card. What the public charge rule did was deny green cards to people who immigration officials decided were likely to use public benefits after they became eligible for them.
It’s a revival of a 19th-century policy that grew out of a nativist backlash to Irish and Italian immigrants. The New York Times in 1887 that the public charge rule would prevent Italy from sending “monthly consignments of Neapolitan mendicants.”
“The new public charge rule seeks to push immigrant families away from the programs that have kept people fed and healthy for decades,” Mamdani said in a statement announcing the cities’ lawsuit. “That fear will not stop at the families that the federal government is targeting. Families who remain fully eligible for benefits will feel a chilling effect, and all New Yorkers will pay for it.”
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