Almost a dozen lawsuits have been filed to try to block the “public charge” rule that is slated to take effect next week. The rule would deny legal permanent residency to many immigrants.
Lawsuits Seek To Block Public Charge Rule
Policy Would Deny Legal Permanent Residency To Many Immigrants
By DEEPTI HAJELA Associated Press
NEW YORK (AP) — The scene is playing out in courtrooms from coast to coast — federal judges being asked to block a new Trump administration policy scheduled to take effect next week that would deny legal permanent residency to many immigrants over the use of public benefits.
Almost a dozen lawsuits have been filed from New York to California with plaintiffs including states, counties, cities, service providers and immigrants to prevent the "public charge" rule from taking effect on Oct. 15. A judge in California held a hearing last week, while a judge in New York held one on Monday, and others are scheduled for this week, with the lawsuits asking for preliminary injunctions to keep the rule from being enforced while challenges to its legality are ongoing. Judges have indicated a willingness to issue rulings before the scheduled start date.
"I've litigated against federal and state agencies over the years and I've never seen anything like this," said Liz Schott of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which has been tracking the progress of the various lawsuits. "It's a tremendously broad set of players reflecting the huge significance and impact of the rule."
The rule is an aggressive step by the Trump administration in its efforts to rewrite the nation's immigration policies with its focus on effectively denying permanent resident status to many legal immigrants through how it defines a "public charge."
Currently, legal immigrants seeking to become permanent residents (a step before being eligible to become naturalized citizens) must prove they won't be burdens to the country, or public charges, which in practice has been understood to mean becoming primarily dependent on cash assistance, income maintenance or government support for long-term institutionalization.
The Trump administration's rule takes that further — considering past and current use of a wide range of assistance like Medicaid, food stamps, and housing vouchers that aren't currently considered, taking into account factors like the immigrant's age, employment status and English-language ability to determine whether they could potentially become public burdens at any point in the future and denying them legal residency if officials decide the answer is yes.
Those changes have outraged immigrants and their advocates, who say there's already been a chilling effect from immigrants who are now scared to ask for help they're eligible to get, for themselves or their relatives including citizen children, out of fear of what it could mean.
They've also said the rule changes are discriminatory and would have the effect of barring immigrants with lower incomes in favor of those with wealth. The government has said the rule changes would ensure that those gaining legal residency status are self-sufficient.
The scheduled enactment next week of the rule comes as the Trump administration on Friday announced another rule, a proclamation effective Nov. 3 that bars immigrants from coming to the U.S. unless they will be covered by health insurance within 30 days of entering or have the financial wherewithal to pay for any medical costs.
In a packed Manhattan courtroom on Monday, U.S. District Judge George Daniels extensively questioned the government's lawyer, Ethan Davis of the Department of Justice, over the rationale behind the administration's changing of the rule and the adding of factors that would be considered in determining whether someone could become a public charge.
"You've got to give me some rational basis," he said.
Roughly 544,000 people apply for green cards annually. According to the government, 382,000 are in categories that would make them subject to the new review, according to the government.
Immigrants make up a small portion of those getting public benefits, since many are ineligible to get them because of their immigration status. And an Associated Press analysis of census data shows that non-citizen immigrants with low incomes have a lower rate of using Medicaid, food aid, cash assistance and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) than their native-born counterparts.
For Medicaid, non-citizen immigrants are only 6.5% of participants, while more than 87% are native-born. For food assistance, immigrants are 8.8% of recipients, with over 85% of participants being native-born.
___
Deepti Hajela covers issues of immigration, race and ethnicity for The Associated Press. Follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/dhajela . For more of her work, search for her name at https://apnews.com .
Hispanic Outlook is an education magazine in the US available both in print and digital form. Visit https://www.hispanicoutlook.com/education-magazine for information about our latest issue, including our new supplement Physician Outlook.
Hispanic Outlook’s Job Board allows applicants to search for jobs by category, by city and by state. Both Featured and Latest Job Positions are available at https://hispanicoutlookjobs.com/
And for employers, Hispanic Outlook’s Job Board offers a wide variety of posting options. Further information is available at https://hispanicoutlookjobs.com/employer-products/
Other articles from Hispanic Outlook:
Health Simplified And Expanded Back To School
I couldn’t resist the urge to join in on this cultural trend and post my OWN tongue-in-cheek “first day” picture as I celebrate starting what I hope to be my new forever job as the medical director at St. Bonaventure University’s Center for Student Wellness. After spending a year on the road as a locum and Urgent Care Physician, it feels good to set down roots. Prior to July of 2018, I had been struggling with Physician burnout. For every 15 minutes I spent with a Patient, I often spent an additional 30 minutes (sometimes more) on my work laptop, clicking away in an EHR that created a pages-long document that didn’t tell my Patient’s story, and that very few read. I was trained to be a medical detective, and my documentation style is very different from the “note bloat” produced by most systems. EHRs are designed to comply with complicated and…
Read full article here
America Can’t Kick The Habit
Drug abuse has always been part of the American landscape since the founding of this country. And it all follows a familiar pattern – introduce a drug with great fanfare and promise, but with little warning about its habit-forming indications or possible side effects. Predictably, people become addicted, and this is followed by restriction and regulation creating criminal enterprise and a criminal class of addicts. Access to illicit drugs like opium, cocaine, marijuana and heroin, as well as prescribed and Physician administered legal drugs such as amphetamines, oxycodone and morphine, continue to make America the world’s leading marketplace per capita for drug use. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. How many times do we have to live through this…
Read full article here
Hispanics’ Deadly Response To Opioid Bias
Opioids are sometimes necessary to treat Patient pain, but Physicians are now being cautioned about prescribing them. In an article entitled “How Racial Inequity Is Playing Out in the Opioid Crisis,” by Jenae Addison for Health Magazine, it is noted that the stereotyping of Patients of color influences the number of prescriptions dispensed. Addison quotes Kenneth Leonard, director of the Clinical and Research Institute on Addictions at the University of Buffalo explaining, “There is a bias issue there in terms of either believing [minorities are] more likely to be substance abusers or they can endure more pain.” The result is while overprescribing opioids is the most recent scourge in America’s war on drugs, under prescribing opioids to Hispanics is contributing to more and more addiction and death in those communities of…
Read full article here
Chi-Chi Rodríguez’s Youth Foundation
As another academic year begins at his public-private school in Clearwater, Florida, this 83-year-old golfer often thinks about his childhood friend. They both grew up in Puerto Rico. As teenagers, they became very close and eventually played on the same amateur, baseball team on the island. One was a talented, right-handed pitcher while the other – a pinch-runner – was an agile ballplayer who always hustled around the base path. The pitcher’s name was Juan Antonio Rodríguez, who one day became an acclaimed golfer where millions around the world still recognize him by his childhood nickname: “Chi-Chi.” Growing up in Puerto Rico, the pinch-runner also had a nickname too. His family and close friends called him “Momen.” But today, millions around the world recall his extraordinary life and legacy. He was called “The Great One,” “Arriba” and “Humanitarian,” but…
Read full article here
La Feria Del Libro En Madrid
More than 400 youngsters began lining up at 8 a.m. and remained in line until noon as the heat descended upon the Retiro park in Madrid, Spain. They weren’t waiting for some concert or latest video game on sale. Instead, they were on line to meet one of more than 1,800 authors who were signing books at Madrid’s historic book fair, La Feria del Libro de Madrid, in late spring from May 31 until June 16. “We are super happy to be able to have the success that we have had. The book has returned, and the people are very happy,” the fair’s director Manuel Gil told me in Spanish with a contagious passion. “The weight of paper is important, and, in the end, people want something physical, and they want that direct relationship with the author.” As an author myself, with my own novel, “NIÑA DUENDE: UN VIAJE DEL ESPÍRITU,” translated to Spanish and with…
Read full article here
5 Latino Authors You Should Be Reading Now
(AP)(THE CONVERSATION) You likely recognize that the depiction of Latin American immigrants in politics today – as a menacing mass of recalcitrant Spanish-speaking invaders – is overwhelmingly negative. What you may not know is that stereotypes suggesting that Latin Americans represent a threat to United States culture are not just morally repugnant – they’re also historically inaccurate. Spanish-language literature actually predates the Puritans’ writing in English by nearly a century. As my research reveals, many renowned Latin American writers actually produced some of their finest work while living in the United States. Latina and Latino writers have made exceptional contributions to American literary history. For a fresh take on what it means to be a Latina or Latino in the U.S. today, check out these five…
Read full article here
