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| Hey kids -- what's your immigration status? |
20 state attorneys general (including DC’s) have sued the Dept. of Justice, Dept. of Health and Human Services, Dept. of Education and Dept. of Labor seeking to void a series of orders issued in mid-July that abruptly ended a host of social programs’ exemptions from a federal ban on serving broad categories of immigrants, both lawfully present and undocumented. The ban was established by the so-called Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWORA), enacted in 1996.
The complaint documents that programs decreed this month to have suddenly lost their exemption from PRWORA’s limiting of benefit eligibility to citizens and “qualified aliens” have been excepted based on rules put in place as soon as PRWORA was enacted in 1996. Many exempted programs, such as the community health center, drug treatment, and Head Start programs, are premised on not checking beneficiaries’ immigration status, and some (e.g., the CHCs) are required by statute not to check immigration status.
