The Department of Justice is closing a Democrat-created bureaucratic loophole that has allowed legal and illegal migrants to get a huge quantity of taxpayer aid since 1997, despite a 1996 law limiting aid to citizens.
The loophole was created by President Bill Clinton’s administration after Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), which was intended to “strengthen… the principle that [legal and illegal] immigrants come to America to work, not to collect welfare benefits.”
“We now retract that [1997] opinion and offer the best reading of the phrase ‘Federal means-tested public benefit,’” President Donald Trump’s Justice Department said on December 16.
The new rule means that legal and illegal migrants will not be able to claim welfare, food stamps, housing, or healthcare subsidies, and many other aid programs. The aid cutoff will likely force more illegals — especially families — back home because many cannot earn enough money to afford housing, food, healthcare, and other expenses in the United States.
The reduced number of migrants will help raise Americans’ wages, reduce their rents, and encourage sidelined Americans to seek jobs.
“Trump DOJ Undoes Clinton Sabotage of the 1996 Welfare Reform Law,” declared the Center for Immigration Studies. “A quarter-century after PRWORA’s enactment — 52.5 percent of households headed by legal immigrants who had not naturalized… received welfare benefits, as compared to 35.9 percent for households headed by the native-born.”
The new rule will prompt lawsuits by pro-migration groups, but it will likely survive.
Members of President Donald Trump’s administration cheered the agency’s decision.
Congress passed the law barring migrants from welfare, but “federal bureaucrats immediately nullified those rules and spent the next three decades sabotaging them without resistance,” White House counselor Stephen Miller posted on X on December 20.
“The American People were betrayed for much longer, in far more ways, and with vastly more contempt for democracy, than most could imagine,” he added.
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