Pressed hard to limit green cards

Emails show Stephen Miller pressed hard to limit green cards

One former Trump official said White House senior adviser Stephen Miller has maintained a “singular obsession” with the public charge rule.

By TED HESSON

White House senior adviser Stephen Miller wasn't getting an immigration regulation he wanted. So he sent a series of scorching emails to top immigration officials, calling the department an "embarrassment" for not acting faster.

The regulation in question would allow the Department of Homeland Security to bar legal immigrants from obtaining green cards if they receive certain government benefits. The rule will likely be released in the coming days, according to a pair of current and former Trump officials briefed on the timeline.

The emails, which POLITICO obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, shed new light on how aggressively Miller has pressured the Department of Homeland Security to move faster on regulations to limit immigration. Critics say the new rule will be used to shore up Trump's political base in the coming election year, and that it's an illegitimate tool to reduce legal immigration.

One former Trump official said Miller has maintained a “singular obsession” with the public charge rule, which he's argued would bring about a transformative change to U.S. immigration.

At the receiving end of Miller's pressure campaign was U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service Director Francis Cissna, an immigration hawk with strong support from restrictionist groups who resigned in May amid a broader Homeland Security Department shakeup that also saw the exit of former Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and other top officials.

In an email sent on June 8, 2018, Miller lambasted Cissna for the pace of his efforts to implement the public charge rule. “Francis — The timeline on public charge is unacceptable,” Miller wrote. “The public charge reg has been in the works for a year and a half. This is time we don't have. I don't care what you need to do to finish it on time. You run an agency of 20,000 people."

In the message, Miller derided Cissna’s overall performance at USCIS, the agency charged with screening visa applicants and processing immigration paperwork. Cissna was known for his deliberate approach to the regulatory process.

“It's an embarrassment that we've been here for 18 months and USCIS hasn’t published a single major reg,” Miller barked.

According to a version of the rule proposed in October 2018, the regulation would allow federal immigration officials to deny green cards to legal immigrants who've received food stamps, welfare, Medicaid, prescription drug subsidies or Section 8 housing vouchers. It could also deny green cards to immigrants deemed likely to receive such government benefits in the future.

With Trump poised to make immigration a centerpiece of his 2020 reelection campaign, a new crackdown on legal immigrants who receive government assistance could energize voters who view immigration — even when done legally — as a fiscal drain and cultural danger.

“This is something that will play well going into the next election, especially considering the prevailing view among the Democratic candidates who are talking about admitting more immigrants and offering more benefits,” said Jessica Vaughan, a director with the Center for Immigration Studies, which pushes for lower levels of both legal and illegal immigration.

But Miller’s previously undisclosed emails could raise legal questions about whether the public charge rule was rushed to completion. The regulatory process will almost certainly be challenged in court, according to opponents bracing for the change.

In addition, the emails could reinvigorate Democratic efforts to compel Miller to testify before Congress. The White House in April denied a voluntary invitation to testify before the House Oversight Committee, which is chaired by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.). The committee chairman had pressed Miller to explain his role in the development of what he called “troubling” immigration policies.

Acting USCIS Director Ken Cuccinelli — Cissna’s replacement at the agency and another immigration hawk — said the public charge regulation will demonstrate that Trump remains committed to his immigration agenda.

“People assign value to leaders who keep their promises,” Cuccinelli said during an interview with POLITICO. “And that’s what the president is doing here.”

The acting director said that Miller was involved with the rulemaking process, but that Trump is “the driving force” behind the public charge effort.

The regulation received more than 266,000 public comments and the final version, which will incorporate feedback from those comments, may differ from the earlier draft rule.

Pro-migrant advocates fear the chilling effect of the regulation will cause migrant families to forgo essential services, even if the benefits aren’t barred under the measure.

“The real fear and danger is that so many families that have an immigrant family member are going to be afraid to go to the doctor, are going to be afraid to go to school," said Sonya Schwartz, a senior policy attorney with the Los Angeles-based National Immigration Law Center.

Cuccinelli said his agency will work to ensure that legal immigrants understand what benefit use could trigger a possible public charge determination.

“We’re going to try to make sure people have clear knowledge of the expectations, so they are not scared off of what they have the right to claim,” he said.

Miller has frequently checked on the status of the public charge regulation since the start of Trump’s tenure, according to a second former official. However, department attorneys were more concerned with crafting a regulation that would withstand legal challenges.

“They understand that for a reg to stick they need to be extremely careful and cross their T’s and dot their I’s,” the person said of the department staff.

“Stephen’s expectations for timelines were always in conflict with what the bureaucracy could do, or in some cases, wanted to,” said a third former Trump official. “[The public charge regulation] was a priority, nobody disputed that, including Cissna. It’s just [that] these things take time.”

The New York Times reported in April that Miller blasted top immigration officials about the lack of progress on public charge and other regulations during a meeting at the White House.

Miller sent his emails as the Trump administration was grappling with fallout over the president’s “zero tolerance” border strategy, which separated thousands of migrant families during a three-month period that began in April 2018. A federal judge ordered the separated families reunited in late June 2018, but a recent court filing by the American Civil Liberties Union contends more than 900 migrant children — including infants and toddlers — have been split apart from parents since then.

USCIS redacted Cissna’s response to Miller’s criticism, but Miller forwarded the reply to Craig Symons, the agency’s chief counsel at the time.

“Months! This needs to be days or weeks!!” Miller wrote to Symons, adding that Mick Mulvaney “promised the president” that it would happen quickly.

Symons responded that agency officials would attempt to get the regulation to the White House budget office before the end of that month. DHS ultimately published a draft version in October — four months later.

A senior administration official criticized the pace of the regulatory process in an April interview with POLITICO, citing concerns “that the career bureaucracy is just slowing things down or engaging in dilatory tactics that keeps things from moving quickly.”

The public charge rule and other measures related to asylum and detaining migrant children were chief concerns, the official said.

The senior official added that Cissna’s agency had “become a bottleneck” for top immigration priorities and that the administration would become more focused on results and “getting wins on the board“ in coming months.

The regulatory measure could allow Trump to demonstrate to voters how he’s been able to reshape the legal immigration system despite an inability to get his policies approved by Congress.

Trump endorsed a Senate bill in 2017, S. 354 (115), that would have cut legal immigration in half over a decade, but the measure — sponsored by Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) — failed to gain traction with Senate Republicans and received no support from Democrats.

More recently, another top adviser — Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner — has worked to develop an immigration reform package that he hopes can unify Republicans. The still-unreleased measure reportedly would rework the legal immigration to value skills over family ties, but without cutting the overall number of immigrants allowed to enter the U.S. each year.

Some opponents of the public charge regulation argue it will lead to lower levels of legal immigration and enable federal officials to deny visas or green cards to an unnecessarily broad pool of immigrants — essentially accomplishing what couldn’t be done through legislation.

“It’s really a rule designed to reduce legal immigration to the United States,” said Stuart Anderson, executive director of the pro-migrant National Foundation for American Policy. “It's clear this has been a Miller goal from the beginning.”

Federal law already bars immigrants likely to become a public charge, but the statute provides little detail and has been used infrequently as a basis for denial. Guidance issued in 1999 clarified that the designation should apply to immigrants who are “primarily dependent“ on cash assistance or the use of long-term, institutionalized care. The pending regulation, judging from its proposed form, would greatly expand the criteria to include non-cash assistance like food stamps and Medicaid.

Beyond the DHS rule, the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict visas to immigrants based on their likelihood to use public benefits is already underway.

The State Department changed its foreign affairs manual in 2018 to toughen the public charge standard and saw denials on that basis skyrocket.

Consular officers rejected 13,450 visa applications based on public charge criteria in fiscal year 2018, according to department figures. They denied only 1,076 applicants in fiscal year 2016, the last full year under former President Barack Obama.

The Justice Department also plans to issue a companion regulation that will outline the grounds to deport someone in the U.S. based on their use of certain public benefits. A draft version of that measure remains under review at the White House budget office.