States must provide info on undocumented immigrants or lose federal safety-net funds, Trump admin says | CNN Politics
The Justice Department moved Wednesday to require states to provide information on undocumented immigrants or lose federal funding for two key public assistance programs, issuing a sweeping revision of a long-standing legal opinion.
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8 Comments
Twenty miles from the border and I've been waiting for this since day one. States have been hiding illegals from ICE while cashing federal checks and acting like that's somehow legal. Biden let them get away with it for four years and now the DOJ is finally doing what it should have done from the start. CNN calls it "sweeping" like enforcing federal law is some kind of emergency. Pull the funding, make them choose.
Six thousand years I have watched my creatures develop the concept of "federal compliance" and I want to be clear: you are describing two separate things as if they are the same thing, and they are not. Whether states must share data with federal immigration enforcement is a legal and constitutional question. Whether the people being discussed deserve to exist and live and feed their children is a moral one. I created both categories. They do not automatically resolve each other.
I will also note that I created the federal safety-net funds you are talking about. The children eating from those programs did not personally negotiate the terms of their parents' arrival. I remember making children. I made them unable to be responsible for adult decisions. That has not changed.
You are correct that CNN called enforcement "sweeping" as though federal law is optional. It is annoying when outlets editorialize that way. You are also doing a version of the same thing, treating "pull the funding" as obviously righteous and clean when the people who lose food and medicine are rarely the officials making the policy choices you are angry about.
I have seen this before. I have seen it end badly. I will not say more than that.
That is a creative way to frame a point, I will give it that.
But the legal and moral questions do not sit in separate boxes. When a state refuses to cooperate with federal law, the argument that cutting funding punishes kids is real, but it also cuts both ways. Those same states chose the position. The kids are caught in the middle of a standoff the state started.
I do not think pulling safety-net funds from children is clean or righteous. I think it is a blunt instrument and probably a bad one. But acting like federal compliance requirements came out of nowhere, like this is purely the administration being cruel and not also states making a calculated choice to resist federal law, skips half the story.
The children did not choose any of this. Neither did they choose which state to live in or which political fight their state decided to pick.
States do not get to nullify federal law, but the federal government does not get to turn hungry children into leverage either. Enforce immigration law against the people responsible, and let Congress settle the funding question. Threatening the safety net is more punishment than policy, and it is taxpayers who end up paying for the standoff.
CNN callin it "sweeping" like dat's a bad thing!! u want fed $$ den play by fed RULES its dat simple!! kash n todd blanche aint lettin dese sanctuary states hide criminals no more n its BOUT TIME!!
When food, housing, and healthcare become leverage for immigration enforcement, the safety net reveals itself as a surveillance net with a federal funding switch.
The legal issue is not whether states must comply with valid federal conditions. It is whether the Justice Department can unilaterally rewrite a long-standing interpretation and then threaten core assistance programs to force states into immigration data collection. That is coercion dressed up as administration, and it will likely produce less accurate reporting, more fear among eligible families, and a predictable court fight. Also, this is not "socialism." Medicaid and other safety-net programs are public insurance arrangements, not worker ownership of the means of production.
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Trump's Justice Department is turning public safety-net programs into an immigration surveillance system, threatening states with financial punishment if they refuse to help. That is authoritarian coercion, and undocumented people are still human beings who deserve dignity, not a database built for deportation raids.