The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 on Monday that a Trump administration immigration rule that has been criticized by some evangelical leaders who say it could prevent poor immigrant families from being reunited can go into effect, pending an appeal.
The court voted on ideological lines Monday in favor of the Department of Homeland Security, staying two lower court rulings that blocked the department’s “public charge” rule from going into effect until the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit can rule on the case.
The agency, through the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in 2018, introduced a rule that alters the way the federal government implements “the public charge ground of inadmissibility” for immigrants applying for visas and green cards who use taxpayer-funded government assistance such as food stamps, housing benefits of Medicaid.
The rule defines “public charge” as a person who “receives one or more public benefits.” The rule was approved after a 10-month public comment period that resulted in over 266,000 public comments.
Critics of the rule contend that it could give the DHS more discretion to deny visas and green cards to immigrants who rely too heavily on taxpayer-funded public assistance.
According to SCOTUS Blog’s Amy Howe, the government argued that it would suffer “effectively irreparable harm” if it is prevented from implementing the new rule until the Second Circuit can rule on the case.
“But, in light of all that’s come before, it would be delusional to think that one stay today suffices to remedy the problem,” wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch in a concurring opinion. “The real problem here is the increasingly common practice of trial courts ordering relief that transcends the concurring cases before them. Whether framed as injunctions of ‘nationwide,’ ‘universal,’ or ‘cosmic’ scope, these orders share the same basic flaw — they direct how the defendant must act toward persons who are not parties to the case.”
SOURCE: Christian Post, Samuel Smith
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