Washington — When she moved from Thailand to the U.S. as a teenager with her father and brother in 1984, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Illinois, and her family faced financial hardship.
“We showed up in Hawaii with like $300 to our name,” Duckworth told CBS News.
Because her father, Franklin Duckworth, who had served in the U.S. Army in World War II and the wars in Korea and Vietnam, struggled to find a job in America, Duckworth said her household was “essentially destitute” and relied on government food stamps to get by. Exacerbating their predicament was the absence of her mother, who remained in Thailand because she could not legally travel to the U.S. with her family, despite being the wife of an American veteran and mother of two U.S. citizens. Her father’s work with refugees after his army service had taken them around the world, but the family had not lived in the U.S. before they moved to Hawaii.
“If my family did not have access to food stamps, I would’ve dropped out of high school and I don’t know where I would be today — but I would probably not be a United States senator,” she said.
Duckworth’s opposition to a proposed rule by the Trump administration that would prevent many low-income immigrants who use public benefits from obtaining U.S. residency is deeply rooted in her personal experience as an adolescent. The one-term senator said she can’t imagine how her father could’ve chosen between accepting food stamps to feed her and her brother or bringing his wife and the mother of his children to America.
“That’s not a choice we should be forcing families to make,” she said.
What it means to be a public charge
The “public charge” term is used by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to describe a person whom the government believes will rely on government welfare programs for subsistence. People who fall into this category are deemed inadmissible to the U.S. “on public charge grounds.”
The Trump administration is now considering a rule change that would significantly expand the definition of a “public charge” and would make it more difficult for certain low-income immigrants to secure permanent residency or temporary visas.
The “public charge” standard was first codified into U.S. immigration law in 1882 and again in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which stipulated that those who were deemed a “public charge” would be subject to deportation or barred from entering the country.
Immigration authorities currently ask green card applicants to prove they won’t be a burden on the country, but the new regulation would require caseworkers to consider the use of government housing, food and medical assistance — like the popular Section 8 housing vouchers, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), as well as Medicaid and Medicare’s Part D prescription drug coverage — by immigrants seeking to reside in the U.S. on a permanent basis.
The complex, more than 400-page proposal would subject households who fall below certain income thresholds, based on the number of family members, to the “public charge” test, which would also consider how well applicants speak, read and write English. Asylum seekers and refugees would be exempt from the test.
Since it was unveiled by the Department of Homeland Security in September, the proposed rule has provoked scathing criticism from Democrats, immigrant advocates and medical groups, who believe the regulation change will harm low-income immigrant communities — particularly children. When the 60-day public comment window on the proposed rule closed on Dec. 10, 216,097 comments had been submitted.
Regulation could jeopardize “the health of millions of children,” says pediatrics group
The American Academy of Pediatrics is one of many medical advocacy groups which have been outspoken in opposing the proposed rule change. Julie Linton, co-chair of the academy’s interest group on immigrant health, said the proposal has already been having a “chilling effect” on immigrant communities since a draft was leaked in 2017, prompting fearful immigrant parents to forego “bread and butter” government benefits which they and their children, often U.S. citizens, qualify for.
“This is such a confusing regulation, and we’re in such a time of fear and uncertainty for immigrant families — and families of color in this country and families living in poverty right now — that this is really jeopardizing the health of millions of children, well beyond those that would definitely be impacted by it,” Linton told CBS News.
As a practicing pediatrician in South Carolina, Linton said she has seen the effects of the proposed rule on some of the immigrant families who visit her clinic. In…
