South Africa tour of India 2019
US To Reverse A Rule That Denied PR To Poor Immigrants.
Biden is throwing out the Trump govt's "public charge" rule, which denied PR to immigrants who used public assistance programs or were suspected of using them in the future.
In a statement, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the 2019 rule "was not consistent with our nation's values."
The announcement comes nearly a year after the Trump administration announced that it would no longer defend the Trump-era rule in court, where plaintiffs had argued that it illegally discriminated against low-income immigrants.
In November 2020, a federal judge agreed, though a coalition of conservative state attorneys general has challenged the Biden govt in court to push the case to the Supreme Court potentially.
Trump has denied PR to immigrants who have been deemed a potential financial burden — for example, more than half of their income is provided by the government. But the Trump administration took that a step further, seeking to deny legal status to anyone likely to use any public assistance program, from food stamps to Medicaid, for over 12 months over 3 years — or if it used two such programs at the same time in a single month.
