The Trump administration is moving to let immigration officers weigh whether some green card applicants have used taxpayer-funded benefits, including Medicaid, food stamps and housing assistance, when deciding whether they qualify for permanent legal status. The Department of Homeland Security is poised to rescind a 2022 Biden-era regulation that narrowed that review.
The change matters now because it could affect hundreds of thousands of people applying from inside the U.S. each year. In a proposal released in 2025, DHS estimated that about 588,000 adjustment-of-status applicants would fall under the broader review, a number large enough to make the rule one of the most consequential immigration changes of President Trump's second term.
At the center of the shift is the public charge test, a long-standing screening tool used to judge whether an applicant is likely to rely on government support. Under the new final rule, officers would again have broader discretion, as they did during the first Trump administration, to weigh an applicant's age, health, family status, assets, financial resources, education, skills and use of means-tested benefits.
Joseph B. Edlow said the federal government is reaffirming self-reliance, protecting public resources and ending policies that encouraged dependency on the backs of hard-working American taxpayers. He also said that under President Trump, USCIS is restoring the basic principle that immigrants must be able to support themselves.
The rule applies to noncitizens inside the U.S. seeking to adjust to lawful permanent residence, and it also reaches noncitizens seeking admission as immigrants or nonimmigrants unless Congress has exempted them. Those exemptions already cover some refugees, asylees and humanitarian categories, including Special Immigrant Juveniles, certain trafficking and crime victims, and Violence Against Women Act self-petitioners.
That broader reach is what gives the proposal its force and its risk. DHS said in the same 2025 proposal that changes to the public charge policy could push about 950,000 people in immigrant households to disenroll from or skip public benefits they may legally qualify for, even when those benefits could help with health care, food or housing.
The agency's stated goal is to steer immigration toward self-support. The likely effect, though, is to make families think twice before using help that Congress has allowed them to receive. DHS has not said when it will finalize the rule or when the broader standard will begin to apply.
