Joseph Edlow, now the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services director, administers the Oath of Allegiance during a naturalization ceremony in October 2020. Manuel Balce Ceneta/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has proposed rescinding the Biden-era “public charge” rule and replacing it with a broader regulation that could allow immigration officers to consider immigrants’ use of any social or health services when deciding eligibility for further legal status, such as green cards.
Issued by the Homeland Security Department and set to be published in the Federal Register, the proposal says rescinding the current rule would “restore broader discretion to evaluate all pertinent facts” and advance a policy that immigrants should be self-reliant and not incentivized by government benefits.
Advocates immediately criticized the proposal as vague and potentially chilling. Adriana Cadenas, executive director of the Protecting Immigrant Families Coalition, said the change “puts the nation’s health and economic wellbeing at risk” by deterring lawfully present immigrants and U.S. citizens from seeking health care and other help they qualify for.
The proposal arrives amid Republican claims of widespread fraud in immigrants’ use of safety-net programs. In reality, people without legal status are excluded from programs like SNAP, the health insurance marketplace and Medicaid. Still, Congress has recently imposed further restrictions that strip some lawfully present immigrants — including refugees, asylum seekers and others with humanitarian protections — of access to SNAP and certain health coverage, and it reduced funding for states that use their own funds to provide care regardless of immigration status. The new rule would also allow consideration of state-funded benefits when reviewing immigration applications. U.S. citizen children of noncitizens remain eligible for these programs.
In February, President Trump signed an executive order aiming to end “all taxpayer-funded benefits for illegal aliens,” part of a broader messaging effort on immigration. That push rests on little evidence of fraud: only about 1% of SNAP over- or underpayments were related to eligibility tied to citizenship status, and that does not demonstrate fraudulent use by people without legal status.
The public charge concept has been politically contentious for years. In 2019, the Trump administration expanded the types of benefits that could count against someone as a public charge, making it harder to obtain permanent status. Public health providers warned that rule created a chilling effect, with immigrants avoiding medical care, food banks and other resources during the COVID-19 pandemic out of fear it would harm their immigration prospects.
In 2022, the Biden administration issued a rule closer to the pre-2019 standard, specifying that use of benefits such as SNAP, housing aid or transportation vouchers would not count against green card applicants. The new DHS proposal would reverse that approach and widen the range of benefits immigration authorities may consider.