Tag: welfare benefits

Arizona House Speaker Wants Voters to Approve Plan to Cut Welfare Benefits for Illegal Immigrants, Strengthen E-Verify

Tom Pappert
Ben Toma

Arizona House Speaker Ben Toma (R-Peoria) announced on Monday an effort to hold a public referendum for Arizona voters to decide whether to eliminate the possibility for illegal immigrants to receive welfare benefits from the state and to strength the E-Verify system used to prevent companies from employing those in the country unlawfully.

In a speech outside the Arizona State Capitol on Monday, Toma called his Protecting Arizona Against Illegal Immigration Act “one of the toughest anti-immigration laws ever written” and declared, “Our message to illegal immigrants is simple: If you want to take advantage of Americans, go somewhere else.”

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Texas Sues Biden Admin over Policy Loosening Restrictions on Illegal Immigrants Seeking Welfare Benefits

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Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing the Biden administration over its changes to a policy that will allow illegal immigrants to more easily obtain welfare benefits.

President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) implemented changes to the rule Dec. 23 to no longer consider certain nutrition, health and housing benefits when deciding whether a noncitizen can legally stay in the country, according to DHS. Paxton is requesting not just action in a Texas court, but is also asking that the Supreme Court intervene, he announced Thursday.

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Lancaster County Will Be Pennsylvania’s First Investigative Target Under New Program to Tackle Welfare Fraud

Anna Marie Bolton

The Pennsylvania Office of Inspector General and the Lancaster County District Attorney’s Office announced last week that they are joining forces to tackle welfare fraud, specifically food-stamp fraud. Commonly referred to as the food-stamp program, the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has increasingly become a concern among law-enforcement officials. Due to the extent of the fraud and the ease with which it has been carried out, as well as the apparent lack of desire to tackle it until now, fraud had “ballooned” from 2012-2016 during President Barack Obama’s term in office. Most recently, the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) released a stunning report linking the misuse of food-stamp dollars to international terrorism as the practice of  “trafficking” raked in millions of dollars for fraudulent convenience stores nationwide. The findings from GAI’s groundbreaking report, titled “EBTerrorism: How Fraud Ridden SNAP Funds Terror, Fails at Enforcement and Wastes Taxpayer Money,” were reported by The Ohio Star last week. In short, the trafficking involved individuals selling their benefits to store owners and managers for less than what they were worth, while the recipients turned them in for full value. Such fraud will be the focus of Pennsylvania’s efforts to find and prosecute those running welfare…

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Battle Heats Up Over Issue of Welfare for Immigrants, Billionaire Koch Brothers and Tennessee Immigrant Activists on the Same Side

Anna Marie Bolton

As President Donald Trump continues to push forward with campaign promises to rein in out-of-control immigration, one measure announced in September has the Open Borders activists and some business tycoons up in arms. It is the so-called “public charge” regulatory change published last week in the Federal Register by the US Citizenship and Immigration (ICE) of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Like all new regulations and re-writes, the proposed rules will be open for public comment. The sixty-day comment period ends on December, 10, 2018. Simply, ‘public charge’ is a very old idea that basically says immigrants shouldn’t be coming to America for welfare benefits. The Trump administration, understanding that the US cannot have open borders and a generous welfare state, wants to make it harder for immigrants already here, in some cases benefiting unfairly from taxpayers’ generosity, to move forward with permanent legal status. Even before the official comment period opened some groups announced their opposition. Two Tennessee pro-immigrant advocacy groups are part of a national campaign to stop the administration’s sweeping reforms of refugee and immigrant policy throughout the government. Calling this recent Trump policy tightening “immoral” and “callous,” the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC) and The Tennessee…

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Trump Administration Will Restrict Green Cards For Foreign Nationals On Public Aid

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by Will Racke   The Trump administration will move forward with regulatory changes that could make hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals living in the U.S. ineligible for green cards if they use any one of a wide range of public assistance programs, immigration officials announced Saturday. The draft regulation expands the definition of “public charge” to include users of many non-cash aid programs such as food assistance and Section 8 housing vouchers. The change restores the definition of public charge to its original meaning under a federal law that aims to block the admission of immigrants likely to become a drain on public resources, according to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. “Under long-standing federal law, those seeking to immigrate to the United States must show they can support themselves financially,” Nielsen said in a statement. “The department takes seriously its responsibility to be transparent in its rulemaking and is welcoming public comment on the proposed rule. This proposed rule will implement a law passed by Congress intended to promote immigrant self-sufficiency and protect finite resources by ensuring that they are not likely to become burdens on American taxpayers.” Under the current interpretation of immigration law, non-immigrant visa holders who receive cash welfare…

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