Education

The Supreme Court Turns Its Back On Hungry School Kids


Yesterday the Supreme Court chose to aid and abet Donald Trump’s latest cruelty toward legal immigrants and their school-age children. The Trump administration has unilaterally changed the definition of “public charge” in a way that violates the law and will result in a lot of hungry kids.

Federal law has long allowed the government to deny green cards to otherwise legal immigrants who are likely to become public charges. Until Trump, a public charge has always meant “persons utterly unable to maintain themselves.” To be considered a public charge, one had to be “physically and mentally incapacitated for labor . . .”. Without any additional authorization from Congress, the Trump administration has radically redefined public charge to include working, legal immigrants who temporarily benefit from even modest amounts of aid such as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (“SNAP”).

The great majority of SNAP beneficiaries work regularly, but often in low paying, less stable jobs. They bag our groceries, mow our lawns, and bus our tables. As everyone knows, many employers, not just “gig” employers, have taken to unpredictably raising and lowering the hours of their employees as they see fit. So, it’s nearly inevitable that a typical fast food or big box employee will go through occasional stretches when they need some assistance to feed their family. Now, applying for temporary assistance can cost them their green card.

Technically, free and reduced-price lunch programs are exempt from Trump’s new rules. However, the practical result will likely be more hungry kids in school. This is partly because less well-off immigrant kids will have less to eat at home because their families can’t get SNAP benefits. But access to free and reduced-price lunches is also affected by lack of access to SNAP. For example, SNAP enrollment is used to enroll low-income families in Community Eligibility Programs that help those families navigate the paperwork and other bureaucratic obstacles to free and reduced-price lunches. That is why the School Nutrition Association has written that the new rule “will result in children going hungry during the school day, even though they are legally authorized and eligible to receive free or reduced-price school meals…”.

The new Trump policy isn’t just cruel and unnecessary, it is also contrary to law. Presidential administrations are supposed to enforce federal law, not change it. Of course, any administration has considerable leeway to interpret laws differently than their predecessors did, but they can’t change clearly established definitions on their own. By grossly expanding the definition of public charge on its own authority, the Trump Administration has done just that.

This is why a federal judge in New York ruled that Trump likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act, which forbids presidents from using executive power to change legislation. There has yet to be a full hearing on this. What the federal judge did was to temporarily restrain Trump from enforcing the new rule until such a full hearing could be had. This was very sensible. Injunctions are often based on what is called the “balance of equities”. Obviously, it is more important to avoid child hunger while the courts decide this issue than it is to save the government a few dollars while the public awaits a decision. Nonetheless, in a 5-4 decision with no accompanying explanation, the Supreme Court overruled the federal judge and Trump may now implement this cruel and unnecessary policy.

President Trump likes to say that he is against illegal immigration but he “loves” legal immigration. On the contrary, he has made it harder to seek asylum into this country, slowed an already slow immigration process, and banned immigration from several Muslim majority countries. And now he has added this. The obvious outcome of this new policy is that legal, hard-working immigrant families will now be afraid to apply for even modest amounts of temporary government help when work is slow or some other misfortune stretches their resources. Immigration is a complicated issue without any one right answer. But condemning more kids—kids who are in this country perfectly legally—to stretches without adequate nutrition, surely isn’t the answer.



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