‘The Agencies offer at best incomplete answers to serious questions,’ the judge said.
A federal judge on Sept. 10 ordered four federal agencies to stop banning illegal immigrants from programs such as Head Start, which provides child care for poorer families.
U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy said the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Department of Justice, the Department of Education, and the Department of Labor must halt, at least for now, efforts to remove illegal immigrants from the programs.
HHS and other agencies said in July they were reinterpreting a federal law called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which states that illegal immigrants cannot obtain “federal public benefits.” Under previous interpretations, people accessing certain programs that lawmakers intended only for Americans and legal immigrants did not need to provide proof of legal status, officials said.
Twenty attorneys general sued, alleging the new interpretation wrongly applied to programs that fell outside the act. In a motion for a preliminary injunction, or a block while the case proceeds, they also said that the government failed to provide “fair notice” to states of the change.
McElroy sided with the states, writing on Wednesday that “while reasonable policymakers can debate the merits of restricting access to programs to lawful citizens—and it is surely not this Court’s job to wade into that debate—the Agencies offer at best incomplete answers to serious questions.”
That appears to violate the Administrative Procedure Act, which lets judges block agency actions determined to be “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law,” she said.
McElroy also pointed to the change in interpretation from decades of precedent.
“The Government argues that it has somehow interpreted this statute incorrectly for the nearly thirty years that it has been the law,” she said. “In its view, everyone (from every past administration) has misunderstood it from the start—at least until last month, when the right way to read it became clear to the Government. The Court is skeptical of that.”
