The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) published an opinion Tuesday telling states that if they receive federal food stamp and Social Security assistance, they are required to report the presence of known illegal immigrants to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
States participating in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs are required to report the presence of illegals to DHS, the opinion states. But it is not just the state or local agencies administering those programs that are required to report to DHS, but rather all agencies in the state, per a 1996 welfare reform law.
According to the Justice Department, all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and multiple U.S. territories participate in those programs to the tune of $16.4 billion every year. That means states currently claiming to be “sanctuaries” for illegal aliens like California, New York, and most recently Virginia, will be forced to hand over the information. That should expedite Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) mass deportation operations.
“When a state chooses to participate in TANF, it accepts the obligation to report illegal aliens in the United States,” Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser of OLC stated in a Wednesday press release. “Tax dollars intended to help vulnerable Americans should not perversely encourage illegal entry into the United States, but rather should reinforce our laws and our borders.”
The Clinton administration wrote an opinion in 1998 that interpreted that law “narrowly” only to include the administering state agencies, but the OLC withdrew that opinion.
“We likewise do not find the concept of congressional acquiescence to be a persuasive reason to cling to the 1998 Opinion’s erroneous statutory interpretation,” the opinion reads. “The fact that subsequent congresses have not affirmatively corrected the 1998 Opinion’s interpretation of section 404 does not alter the plain meaning of the statute. Indeed, it is constitutionally problematic to equate legislative inaction with action.”
OLC’s Deputy Assistant Attorney General Joshua Craddock, who wrote the opinion, said there are no “new obligations on states,” but rather that the opinion “restores the original meaning of the statute Congress enacted and ensures that DHS receives the information it is legally entitled to.” States that do not comply risk losing program funding, Craddock added, but the Department of Justice said that states will not face “retroactive penalties” because they relied on the Clinton-era opinion.
As The Federalist reported, the Clinton administration took numerous actions to pave the way for illegal aliens to come into the country, especially those who offer nothing to American society and were virtually guaranteed to leech off the welfare system.
That included trashing the “public charge” rule that had governed American immigration law for at least 100 years, which said that an immigrant should not be admitted into the country if he was unlikely to be able to take care of himself without government assistance.
Now it is estimated that 59 percent of illegal immigrant households are on at least one welfare program, and 52 percent of legal immigrant households are in the same position. Meanwhile, 39 percent of native-born Americans use at least one welfare program, which is still an enormous amount, but the fact remains that the programs are for Americans, not foreigners.
The opinion comes after the Trump administration has placed an intense focus on welfare fraud across the country, particularly fraud committed by illegal aliens or other foreigners. The crackdown has included stopping federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funding through the Department of Agriculture (USDA) for states refusing to hand over immigration status data to the federal government. The opinion appears to be another way of doing the same.
