TRENTON – Attorney General Jennifer Davenport today joined a coalition of 21 other attorneys general in suing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) over its unlawful public charge rule, which would allow immigration officials broad discretion to deny immigrants green cards for the lawful use of public benefits. DHS’s reinterpretation of the public charge rule will harm public health, increase the spread of communicable diseases, contribute to hunger and food insecurity, and harm New Jersey financially.
“The Trump Administration’s public charge rule is cruel and arbitrary,” said Attorney General Davenport. “It forces immigrant families into an impossible position: fearing to seek help to cover their basic needs, including for healthcare or food, because of the risk that their green card applications might be flagged for rejection by an immigration official. If allowed to go into effect, this callous policy will harm not just immigrants but also the wider community by undermining public health and increasing costs for everyone.”
Under the traditional interpretation of the “public charge ground of inadmissibility,” noncitizens can be denied entry to the United States if they are unable to support themselves financially, without relying on cash assistance for income maintenance or long-term institutionalization at government expense. In 2022, DHS issued a rule reaffirming this long-standing interpretation.
DHS’s new rule reverses the 2022 version and gives immigration officers broad discretion to count the use of any means-tested public benefit, for any length of time, against an applicant, including for individuals seeking permanent residency. The rule also allows immigration officers to consider some benefits legally used by the applicant’s family members whom the applicant is legally obligated to support, even if the family member is a U.S. citizen.
There is no clear limit on which benefits, or how much use, count against an applicant, leaving families to guess which forms of assistance might put their immigration status at risk. However, the types of means-tested benefits that immigration officials could consider includes vital safety-net programs providing assistance with emergency medical treatment; health coverage (including through the Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP, and Medicaid); food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP); housing assistance; and other programs.
The Administration’s own comments acknowledge that the rule will have a “chilling effect” on those seeking assistance, causing eligible individuals, including U.S. citizens, to disenroll from or avoid seeking benefits to which they are legally entitled. This in turn will result in substantial decreases in federal funding to state-administered benefits programs.
New Jersey is home to nearly 2.2 million immigrants who make up almost a quarter of the state’s population. If the rule is allowed to go into effect and eligible recipients disenroll from these programs, the impact of this draconian change will affect entire communities. If eligible people avoid seeking medical care or childhood immunizations to avoid adverse immigration consequences, this may contribute to the wider spread of communicable disease and create worse public health outcomes for everyone. And the rule will have other effects reaching far beyond the families who disenroll from public benefits. For example, when people lose access to health coverage, they delay care and turn to emergency rooms instead, resulting in additional uncompensated care for safety-net hospitals, and straining community health centers, raising costs for everyone. Reduced participation in SNAP can also harm local economies, draining money from the grocery stores and local businesses that depend on SNAP recipients’ business.
The rule will also result in direct harm to states’ finances. The Trump Administration’s own estimates show that disenrollment or forgone enrollment resulting from this rule could reduce federal Medicaid and CHIP transfer payments to the states by more than $4 billion annually and federal SNAP funding by more than $1 billion annually.
The coalition argues that the new rule violates the Administrative Procedure Act because it is arbitrary and capricious, exceeds DHS’s statutory authority, and departs from the longstanding meaning of the public charge provision established by Congress. The attorneys general are asking a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to declare the 2026 public charge rule unlawful and vacate it, protecting states and their residents from its unlawful harms.
Joining Attorney General Davenport in filing this lawsuit, which was led by the attorneys general of New York, California, and Illinois, are the attorneys general of Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia, and the governor of Pennsylvania. The lawsuit was filed alongside a coalition of cities and counties led by the City of New York.
