This case challenges two of Trump administration’s latest immigration-based public charge policies, building upon our historic case Make the Road New York v. Cuccinelli, in which we successfully challenged Trump’s first public charge policy. Briefly, “public charge” refers to a determination that noncitizen is likely to become primarily and permanently dependent on the government for subsistence, demonstrated by reliance on cash assistance or long-term institutional care at public expense; the overwhelming majority of applicants for immigrant visas are not eligible for cash welfare and remain ineligible for years. Still, the Trump administration’s State Department has returned to promulgate two new public charge policies: (1) an unprecedented nationality-based ban on legal immigration for nationals of 75 majority nonwhite countries based on an unsupported and demonstrably false claims that nationals of these countries are likely to become “public charges,” and (2) sweeping new discriminatory rules governing how the government determines who is likely to become a public charge in the first place.

Both policies are central to and emblematic of the Trump administration’s crusade against nonwhite immigrants. High-level administration officials have publicly subscribed to a “Great Replacement Theory” or “White Replacement Theory,” which falsely imagines there has been an orchestrated plot to replace white Americans with nonwhite immigrants—a theory that animates this and other racist-exclusionary immigration policies. In pursuit of this broader racially discriminatory aim, the policies overwhelmingly target nonwhite and limited-English-proficient immigrants from nations across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. No reasonable, factual, or empirical basis has been offered for why nationals of these specific countries pose any heightened public charge “risk.”  This ban reflects the Trump administration’s systemic racial preferencing and demonizes and punishes immigrants from select Black and Brown countries.

The parties allege that the latest public charge policies violate the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), the Accardi doctrine and the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The filing aims to put an end to these discriminatory policies and to prevent the Trump administration’s unlawful attempts to rewrite the INA and undermine the Constitution.