Trump’s Latest Assault on Immigrants Shreds a Half-Century of Reforms
“Let’s be absolutely clear about what’s happening here. Proposing new regulations to deprive immigrants and their US-citizen children of access to basic assistance programs is designed to create a caste of untouchables: immigrants who pay taxes but can’t access services; US-citizen children who are legally entitled to benefits, but whose parents’ residency rights will be challenged by a malignant government if they are indeed enrolled in these programs by their parents. It creates the utterly repugnant situation of the US government denying residency permits to would-be immigrants who meet every other criterion for admission but have a disease such as cancer or a mental-health issue that an immigration official chooses to interpret as meaning they are a ‘public charge’ risk.”