Supreme Court Pretty Sure Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses Just A Bunch Of Mooches Anyway

It's not a final ruling, but the Supreme Court has lifted yet another stay letting yet another fascist Trump immigration policy go into effect. USA! USA! USA!

It's a day that ends in "y," so the Trump regime is screwing over immigrants again.

As of Monday, US immigration officers around the world will be using a person's wealth to determine whether they should be granted a visa or green card.

This was yet another fun indication from the Supreme Court that it has no problems with the racist-in-chief's penchant for fascism and destroying the lives of would-be immigrants.

 In August , Der Führer 's minions at the Department of Homeland Security announced their latest policy to hurt immigrants: a wealth test. Our federal government has decreed that immigration officials should not grant green cards to people who rely on public assistance programs, like food stamps. And that's not all! Immigration officers have also been instructed to discriminate against people who are unemployed, lack a high school education, or aren't fluent in English.

 Give me your tired, your poor? 

Nah.

Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge[.]

Yup, that's something Ken "The Cooch" Cuccinelli, Trump's Acting Secretary of Homeland Security, actually said on TV when this disgusting policy was announced. (Also the same guy seen asking his Twitter friends to help him Google "coronavirus" on Monday, because of how he is on that task force.)

The wealth test, or "public charge" rule, will bar immigrants from coming to the US if DHS determines they are "likely to be a public charge[.]" Basically, this means officers are free to discriminate against people they believe are at risk of relying on federal benefits like food stamps, Medicaid, or housing vouchers. The rule also punishes legal immigrants living in the US who are trying to get green cards to become permanent residents, if they have legally used these federal programs. It applies to immigrants applying for permanent residency, as well as non-immigrants applying for tourist, business travel, student, and skilled worker visas.

Yeah. It's all kinds of fucked.

The total number of people the wealth rule will affect is unclear, but it could be in the millions. As reported by Vox ,

Julia Gelatt, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, [said] that 69 percent of the roughly 5.5 million people who were granted green cards over the past five years would have had at least one negative factor under the rule — which officials could have used as justification to reject their applications for immigration benefits.

And the rule doesn't just hurt people by denying them residency or permanent legal status. Already, many fearful immigrants have stopped using government benefits they are legally entitled to, and that help them keep food on their tables and a roof over their heads.

A number of cases challenging this wealth test were filed after it was announced, by immigrants' rights organizations, people who might be affected by the policy, and state and local governments. In October, Southern District of New York Judge George Daniels penned a fiery order blocking the policy from going into effect, saying things like:

It is repugnant to the American Dream of the opportunity for prosperity and success through hard work and upward mobility. Immigrants have always come to this country seeking a better life for themselves and their posterity. With or without help, most succeed.

PREACH!

But yesterday, thanks to Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and the Supreme Court, this un-American bullshit rule went into effect, with all five conservative justices voting last Friday night that the wealth test should proceed. All four liberal justices dissented. The vote mirrored a January vote that allowed the decision to be implemented elsewhere in the country.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the only justice to write a dissent, schooled the conservative majority about its recent trend of upending injunctions issued by lower courts to help Trump as much as they possibly can.

Perhaps most troublingly, the Court's recent behavior on stay applications has benefited one litigant over all others. This Court often permits executions—where the risk of irreparable harm is the loss of life—to proceed, justifying many of those decisions on purported failures "to raise any potentially meritorious claims in a timely manner." [...] 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.

While Justice Sotomayor stood up for what's right, the Court's conservatives asked Trump if he had any boots for them to lick. At the time the other injunction about the wealth tax was lifted , Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas whined in concurrence about nationwide injunctions, making it seem as if the issue was the nature of nationwide injunctions, not the merits of Trump's latest fascist policy. With this vote, Gorsuch and Thomas made it clear that they're actually just totally fine with fucking over people who are trying to start over in our country.

Cool.

Meanwhile, the fight over the policy will continue in lower courts.

Lifting the stay doesn't necessarily mean the Supreme Court will uphold the rule when these cases finally get up to them on the merits — but it does give us a pretty good indication of what the justices are thinking.

Of course, if a rule like this had been in place in previous years, decades, and centuries, the vast majority of Americans probably wouldn't be here. In fact, it's likely that Trump's own grandfather would have been denied entry to the country under his grandson's new rule.

I can't wait until we officially change the national motto to "Fuck immigrants and poor people."

Here's the order:

[ DHS / Vox / SCOTUS ]