WASHINGTON—The Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) filed a brief in a Texas federal district court showing that the Biden Administration’s 2022 public charge rule should be struck down because it fails to implement a statute excluding aliens who are likely to be dependent on welfare.
Since before this nation’s founding, Americans have excluded aliens likely to be “public charges”—that is, dependent on the government for support. In the 1990s, Congress passed statutes directing that those likely to be public charges should not be accepted as immigrants.
In “interpreting” the phrase “public charge” in these statutes, the Clinton Administration drastically narrowed it, excluding not all public charges, but only those who depended on cash benefits, as opposed to non-cash benefits such as food stamps. This agency interpretation remained in place for twenty years, under presidents of both parties, until, in 2019, the Trump Administration issued a public charge rule aligned with the full meaning of “public charge” intended by Congress.
In 2022, following lawsuits by activists demanding welfare for aliens, the Biden Administration issued a new public charge rule that echoed the earlier Clinton interpretation.
In its brief against the 2022 rule, IRLI shows that, though Congress clearly excludes almost all welfare-dependent aliens in the public charge statute, the Biden rule, in reviving the flawed Clinton interpretation, only excludes a fraction of them. By disregarding so much of the statute’s sweep, the administration fails to implement the statute, and thus exceeds its authority.
“From colonial times onwards, America has insisted that settlers and immigrants be self-sufficient, not taxpayer-dependent,” said Dale L. Wilcox, executive director and general counsel of IRLI. “This rule has served our nation well, but in recent decades it hasn’t been enforced—except under President Trump—to the point where immigrant households are now more dependent on public assistance than native households. We hope the court sees how much this administration and most earlier ones have disregarded the law, and strikes down Biden’s reversion to prior bad practice.”
The case is Texas v. Mayorkas, No. 6:23-cv-00001 (S.D. Tex.).
