Judge Blocks A New Trump Immigration Rule

election rallies. If Democrats were ever to seize power, they would open the floodgates to unvetted, uncontrolled migration at levels you have never seen before. You think youavin bed now, You would never have seen anything like what they want to do. The latest policy change is a presidential proclamation that bars the entry of immigrants who don't have health insurance, a rule of federal judge has just put on hold. Joining me is Leon Fresco, a partner at hollanden Night.

He was formerly the head of the Office of Immigration Litigation at the Justice Department. Tell us about the latest rule change, well, the latest rule change was one that involved the president issuing a proclamation that said that if anyone was living outside the United States and wanted to get a green card to come into the United States, then that person would need to have health insurance in order to be allowed to get their green card in

order to come live permanently inside the United States. Would that be difficult for the Homeland Security Department to police that kind of a rule. Absolutely, that rule is incredibly difficult to police for several reasons. One, there was an exception to the rule that said, if you can't provide proof of health insurance, that you could still show that you had sufficient assets to buy health insurance. And it

was unclear what those sufficient assets were. There was no amount of money that was given in terms of either income or cash in the bank or anything else that determined what would those sufficient assets be. So health care can be any kind of cost. That can be somewhere between two thousand a month three thousand a month. That just depends, and that was all going to be up to an individual counselor officer to determine in a ninety

second interview. So that's number one, But number two more challenging is the fact that since most healthcare in the United States is purchased from one's employer, having someone who's a foreign national trying to get health insurance in the United States turns out to be a very, very difficult task because there really is no insurance other than the normal visitor traveler insurance, and that's not intended for people

who are going to live here permanently. So this targets the kind of integration that President Trump opposes, where immigrants joined family members who are here. Correct, because what happens is there's three ways in which individuals can get Green cards if they're sitting from abroad, and the main way is the family way. The second way is the employer way,

and the third way is the diversity lottery. And then actually Way one and Way three whether it's a diversity lottery or the family green card, which are both green cards that are not well liked by this administration. The idea was, let's try to develop a choke point, which is that we can show that individuals won't have health insurance and that way we can shut them down from

coming into the United States. Irrespective of the fact that Congress allocated a certain number of green cards the year for these purposes, didn't the first lady's parents come here under that so called chain migration. So what is the president dislike it? So I think it's just an issue

of significant pushback from the immigration restrictionist groups. They think that the six hundred to six hundred and fifty thousand Green cards a year that are given to relatives of US citizens is way too high, and the closer they can get that numbered to zero, the happier they would be, irrespective of who's coming or why they're coming, or whether

they're contributing or not. And so it's unclear what the end goal is, but the medium term goals are to serve obstacles, so to speak, in order to try to get those numbers down. Leon tell us about the lawsuit

challenging this rule. So the grounds of the lawsuit are that Congress essentially issued the ways in which one could be disqualified from the United States under a statute called a U. S c. Even eighty two, which are called grounds of an immissibility, and it lays out all the grounds of an immissibility and it says, these are the

reasons why you can't come in. And so the idea is that the President has exceeded his authority with regard to these grounds of an immissibility by adding this new healthcare essentially ground of an immissibility without going through the normal regulatory process, which has notice in common, and without

showing that there's an actual statutory basis for it. Because the public Charge Statute, which we've talked about in the past, which talks about whether you will be dependent on welfare, doesn't have an affirmative requirement that you actually have healthcare, and just asks will you be dependent upon public services? And once you've crossed that threshold, the idea is that the president can invent a new threshold called, well, do you have health care too? A federal judge issued a

temporary restraining order. Was that decision based on the merits at all? Well, he's saying that the plaintiffs have shown enough to stop it for right now. So what the judge has basically said is, look, this thing is too difficult right now to put into effect. Nobody knows how to get health insurance, and it's not clear that it's legal.

So we're just gonna stop it for now, and we're gonna put some more evidence in the record, and then I'll either issue a preliminary injunction or the dependants will win, the government will win, and this thing will go into effect. But for now, it's not in effect, Meaning if you go to a window in India or China or the Philippines tomorrow to try to get a green card for your interview, you don't have to at the moment show that you're going to have health insurance in the United States.

And where does the public charge rule that the Trump administration tried to impose, where does that stand? Well, the new public charge rule is in litigation, and it's been enjoined by various district courts, and so that's going to be working up its way, probably to the Supreme Court, which is probably getting quite flustered that it's having to take ten immigration cases a year, which it used to

normally take one or two. But since this is where a lot of the government action is happening right now in immigration, the Supreme Court is going to have to hear the public charge case most likely. But also this is sort of a subset of that, because the question

is whether the public charge law precludes this. Actually the presidents using the same travel band authority that was used for the Hawaii case which he wanted the Supreme Court, he's basically just saying I'm banning people without health insurance. It's like he said, I'm banning people from around and Syria and Libya. He's saying, I'm just banning people without health insurance. And the question is, well, why can't the president just add that ban and just had a new

reason to ban people. Well, why can't he, Leon, If he can ban people who come from certain countries, why can't he ban people who don't have health insurance. Well, I mean, the statutory framework is broad enough that if one we're looking at this again purely from a computer standpoint, I think the answer would be the president could ban people. And I mean I was here a year ago telling you that the president was probably gonna win the travel ban case, and so he may probably win this case too.

But what starts to happen is at what point does a president start acting so arbitrarily and capriciously that the courts do nothing, that they just continue to allow these proclamations to issue, to the point where the president is circumventing the fact that a Congress wanted an immigration system in the United States, and that all of these things are basically operating to not have an immigration system in the United States. Thanks Leon. That's Leon Fresco, a partner

at hollanden Knight. Thanks for listening to the Bloomberg Law Podcast. You can subscribe and listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and on bloomberg dot com slash podcast. I'm June Brosso. This is Bloomberg