Senate Votes Against Biden DHS Loosening Migrant Public Charge Standards
The Senate passed legislation on May 17 that could knock out the Biden administration’s new, looser rule for deciding whether migrants are likely to become public charges within America’s welfare state.
Fifty lawmakers voted yea, while 47 voted nay. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) was among those who backed it.
The measure is a joint resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act. Those resolutions allow Congress to take down agency rules soon after they’re proposed. The law also prevents agencies from reissuing a rule “substantially the same” as the one that met with congressional disapproval.
The White House’s Office of Management and Budget on May 17 announced that President Joe Biden would veto the legislation, saying the Department of Homeland Security’s rule provides “a clear, comprehensive, and fair standard for assessing whether a noncitizen is likely to become a public charge.”
If Biden breaks out his veto pen, both chambers would need two-thirds majorities to overcome it.
The House still needs to vote on its version of the legislation.
Biden has so far vetoed three bills, all of them joint resolutions of disapproval aimed at rules from his agencies.
The latest veto came on May 16, when the commander-in-chief struck down a measure that would have restored tariffs on some solar panels from China.
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The latest joint resolution targets a September 2022 rule from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), an agency currently headed by Alejandro Mayorkas.
Mayorkas has often said America’s greatest threat is “white supremacists,” drawing disapproval from Republicans such as Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.).
“Apparently he is unaware that there were five people on the FBI’s terror watch list who were just found at the Southern Border. I’d consider that a far greater threat!” she wrote on Twitter.
U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers have encountered hundreds of individuals on the terrorism watch list on the United States’ borders in this fiscal year. The latest statistics show that the relative percentage of such encounters has significantly increased compared to past years.
Border Patrol Southwest land border encounters have swelled, topping 250,000 in December 2022 alone.
In April 2021, soon after taking office, Mayorkas announced his intention to address “violent extremism threats” within his new agency, citing Jan. 6 as the impetus for his actions.
President Donald Trump’s DHS in 2019 broadened the definition of “public charge.”
Mayorkas’s rule would go in the other direction, eliminating from consideration the receipt of food stamps, Medicaid, and housing benefits, among other forms of public assistance.
DHS claims its new rule is partly intended to avoid a “chilling effect”: “individuals disenrolling or declining to enroll themselves or family members in public benefits programs for which they are eligible.”
In March 2021, Mayorkas declared he would no longer defend the Trump-era public charge standard in the courts, asserting it was “not in keeping with our nation’s values.”
“The Biden administration’s relaxed Public Charge Rule is one more policy that signals to all would-be illegal immigrants that the border is open, with plenty of U.S. taxpayer-funded benefits ready for the taking once you get across,” said Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.), one of a dozen co-sponsors of the Senate resolution, in a March statement on the measure.
“My legislation will ensure America welcomes self-sufficient new citizens who are ready to contribute, while reigning in excessive spending,” said Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), who introduced the resolution, in the same statement.
