A proposed Trump administration rule would give immigration officers more discretion to deny permanent residency to immigrants lawfully in the country who rely on public benefits, like SNAP or Medicaid.
A U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson said in an email that the revised “public charge” policy follows what it called a “long-standing expectation” that immigrants be self-reliant and that federal government benefits should not incentivize immigration.
In its policy proposal, the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged that this change may lead to “downstream effects on public health, community stability and resilience,” including worse health outcomes and increased poverty.
Benyamin Chao, health and public benefits policy manager for the California Immigrant Policy Center, said the change is meant to cause chaos and fear by creating a chilling effect.
“We’re concerned that family members of immigrants will choose to withdraw from services themselves, from the services that they are legally entitled to,” he said.
Chao argued the policy change would let the Trump administration deny citizenship applications based on use of nearly any health or social service program.
“Immigrants contribute to these safety net programs but are pushed out of them,” he added. “And this public charge rule is one way of pushing them out of services that they’re contributing to.”
Jackie Mendelson, a policy advocate with Nourish California, said she sees this as another attempt by the Trump administration to weaponize hunger.
“It’s going to have such a huge impact on many communities, not just immigrants themselves who are accessing those programs, but their children, their families and even the communities that welcome them, and U.S. citizens who are part of these families.”
Lauren Au is an associate professor with the UC Davis Center for Poverty and Inequality Research whose work focuses largely on WIC. She expects this change will lead to similar consequences seen when the first Trump administration changed the policy, which she said led to a chilling effect within the WIC community.
“It caused a lot of confusion and chaos in terms of how to interpret these rules and the different providers that are involved,” she said. “Overall, I think if this were to go into effect, we would see the increase in food insecurity, we’ll also see harms to the economy because this will reduce the amount of SNAP dollars available to be able to give back to the local economy.”
Au added that this will also affect immigrant enrollment in some benefit programs, noting that qualifying for one usually automatically qualifies them for others.
“What we are going to see is this ripple effect where a family may not enroll in Medicaid because of this fear and then they are in turn not going to be eligible for SNAP,” she explained. “It’s not just going to impact food insecurity, it’s going to impact overall health.
Au said that could also lead to more emergency room visits, higher chronic disease and increased poverty.
The proposal is now in a 30-day public comment period that ends Dec. 19. It cannot take effect until then.
