US Supreme Court dismisses case over ‘public charge’ immigration rule

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US Supreme Court dismisses case over ‘public charge’ immigration rule

Jaclyn Belczyk | JURIST Executive Editor

June 15, 2022 02:37:12 pm

The US Supreme Court on Wednesday dismissed a case in which Republican-led states were attempting to defend a Trump-era immigration policy known as the “public charge” rule after the Biden administration declined to do so. In a brief order, the court dismissed Arizona v. City and County of San Francisco as “improvidently granted.”

Under 8 USC § 1182(a)(4)(A), the government may deny noncitizens admission or adjustment to immigration status if they are likely to become public charges. Between 1999 and 2019, public charges were defined as individuals likely to receive cash assistance for income maintenance or institutionalization for long-term care at government expense. However, in August 2019, the Trump administration issued a final rule further defining public charges to mean someone more likely than not at any time in the future to receive one or more designated public benefits for more than 12 months in the aggregate within any 36 months.

The rule change caused discord in several states. Multiple states sought preliminary injunctions in the US Courts of Appeals for the Second, Fourth, Seventh and Ninth Circuits, alleging that they were injured when noncitizens, confused by the rule’s implications, unenrolled unnecessarily from state public benefits. The Ninth Circuit stayed the injunctions issued in its circuit, while the Second and Seventh Circuits denied the stays.

In March 2021, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that it would no longer appeal court rulings enjoining the 2019 rule’s enforcement. As a result, the Seventh Circuit granted the federal government’s motion to dismiss Cook County v. Wolf, a case pertaining to the enforcement of the 2019 rule. This dismissal led to DHS announcing that the Cook County ruling, which vacated the 2019 rule, would be in effect nationwide and that the 1999 rule would control.

In response to this, 14 states collectively filed motions to intervene, arguing that because the US announced its intention to stop defending the rule and the cases were dismissed so abruptly after the announcements, the states were going to defend the rule themselves. The Fourth and Seventh Circuits dismissed the states’ motions, and DHS issued a final rule removing the 2019 rule.

In June, Arizona and 12 other states asked the Supreme Court to intervene, and the court agreed to take up the case. The court heard arguments in the case in February but ultimately dismissed the case Wednesday. In a concurring opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, wrote that the dismissal “should not be taken as reflective of a view on any of the foregoing issues, or on the appropriate resolution of other litigation, pending or future, related to the 2019 Public Charge Rule, its repeal, or its replacement by a new rule.”

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.