Recently I wrote on my personal Substack about the Trump Administration crackdown on Green Cards for legal immigrants who are “likely to become a public charge.”
This is a very old law—as long as America has had any immigration policy at all, it has had a policy of not deliberately importing poverty, in the shape of people who can’t or won’t support themselves.
It stopped being enforced during the Clinton Administration which decided various forms of welfare like food stamps didn’t count as a cash welfare, allowing “public charges” to avoid deportation.
See this table from 2001:
After I did the article above, Christopher Rufo and CITY JOURNAL released a a report on California’s use of welfare for illegal immigrants.
EXCLUSIVE: California has created a shadow welfare system for illegal aliens. Free housing, cash, healthcare, food, phones, college tuition, even car insurance—costing taxpayers more than $10 billion per year.
We went inside the system and exposed it all. pic.twitter.com/oJh0mpstzN
— Christopher Rufo (@christopherrufo) September 23, 2026
California’s Shadow Welfare System for Illegal Immigrants, City Journal, September 24, 2026
If you’re an illegal immigrant family in California, you can receive $100,000 a year, not counting potential millions in case of medical expenses—illegals in California qualify for the state’s Medi-Cal program.
The state of California is aware that by law it can’t distribute many federal benefits to illegals, so it’s set up parallel programs specifically for the benefit of illegals—benefits not available to impoverished American citizens.
Local officials were remarkably transparent. In Glendale, we spoke to a welfare officer about California’s Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants (CAPI), a state-funded alternative to Supplemental Security Income that provides monthly cash assistance to low-income noncitizens who are elderly or disabled.
“If [you are] a citizen, you cannot get CAPI,” he said. “I don’t care about legal or not. Not being [a] citizen [is the key].”
Which is interesting, because if you had a benefit for Americans only, it would run up against the antidiscrimination laws.
But California’s decision to support foreign poor people at the expense of California’s (mostly American) taxpayers makes the whole country poorer, and I simply don’t believe the California government isn’t using Federal funds for all this: all states receive Federal transfer payments for things like
- Medicaid and health programs,
- Education grants
- Income Security and food assistance: Programs like SNAP (food stamps) provide direct nutritional and financial aid to eligible households.
And eligible households have for years included illegal aliens with anchor babies. But here’s where the public charge meets remigration. All this government money is recorded, and so are the recipients.
In 2015, “conservative” pundit George Will was attacking then-candidate Trump’s plan to deport the (estimated) 11 million illegals in the US.
He said:
To meet a two-year deadline, his “management” wizardry will have to quickly produce a network of informers to assist at least 100,000 new law enforcement officers equipped with battering rams and bloodhounds.
In response, a VDARE author wrote: George Will Wrong To Think DHS Would Need A “Network Of Informers” To Deport Illegals—Their Addresses Are On The Government Checks!
All that “public charge” information can be federally subpoenaed and used to prioritize deportations. It can also be used to decide whether current Green Card holders in the US get to stay, and whether citizenship applicants get citizenship, or, if they’ve become a public charge, can be told to go home—which is what immigrants did before there was a welfare state.
Here are five previous articles which discuss how the “public charge” rule can be used to support remigration:
- America’s Foreign Born Population In Decline, Says the CIS: 2. 2 Million Have “Self-Deported”
- A Former Border Patrol Agent Reviews Elon Musk’s Appearance on Joe Rogan
- What the Trump Administration Must Do to Curtail LEGAL Immigration in 2025
- Remittances: The U.S. Is Not the World’s Cash Cow
And finally:
James Fulford has been writing about the national question for over 20 years, mostly for VDARE.com, more recently for White Papers. Subscribe to his personal Substack here.