EEW Magazine // Politics // Immigration

In January, the Supreme Court voted in favor of allowing the Trump administration to implement a new policy that causes legal immigrants' use of public benefits like food stamps, Medicaid and housing vouchers to be counted against them on their green card applications.

The immigrant wealth test took effect in 49 states and is going through the appeals process. On Friday, the Court's five conservatives voted in favor of the same measure taking effect in Illinois—something Justice Sonia Sotomayor rails against in her biting dissent, accusing her colleagues of favoring the Trump administration.

Sotomayor, 65, specifically voiced her disapproval of how often the conservative-controlled Court grants the Trump administration stay applications and approves Trump policies despite them being blocked by the lower courts.

“Claiming one emergency after another, the government has recently sought stays in an unprecedented number of cases, demanding immediate attention and consuming limited court resources in each,” wrote the Justice. “And with each successive application, of course, its cries of urgency ring increasingly hollow.”

Immigrants applying for permanent residency must now show they wouldn’t be public charges or in other words burdens to the country. Under the old rules, people who used non-cash benefits, including food stamps and Medicaid, were not considered public charges.

Roughly 544,000 people apply for green cards annually. According to the government, 382,000 are in categories that would make them subject to the new review.

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The new policy, which is the brainchild of Trump advisor Stephen Miller, also allows immigration officials to consider factors like health ailments and educational attainment as a basis for denying green cards. Many experts believe this policy will force immigrants to choose between earning a green card and feeding and housing themselves and their families.

Sotomayor argues that conservatives repeatedly accept the Department of Justice’s declarations of an “emergency” and give President Trump whatever he desires.

This practice, she said, has “benefited one litigant over all others”—Donald Trump— which she feels is especially egregious in light of the Court’s recent refusal to stop unconstitutional executions. “This Court often permits executions—where the risk of irreparable harm is the loss of life—to proceed,” Sotomayor said, while pointing out that the Court then pins the blame on death row inmates and claims that they failed “to raise any potentially meritorious claims in a timely manner.”

She ended her dissent saying, “Yet the Court’s concerns over quick decisions wither when prodded by the Government in far less compelling circumstances—where the Government itself chose to wait to seek relief, and where its claimed harm is continuation of a 20-year status quo in one State. I fear that this disparity in treatment erodes the fair and balanced decision-making process that this Court must strive to protect.”

The court’s three other liberal justices, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Elena Kagan also voted to prevent the policy from taking effect.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.