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Attorney General William Tong today joined a coalition of 20 other attorneys general in suing the federal administration to stop its plan to restrict illegal aliens from accessing health, education, and social service programs in order to protect taxpayer-funded benefits for American citizens.
Earlier this month, the administration issued notices prohibiting state safety net programs from serving illegal aliens, a change that Tong said introduced "catastrophic uncertainty" into the system.
Tong and the coalition are angry that the change would prevent illegals from accessing services like Head Start, Title X family planning, adult education, workforce development programs, domestic violence shelters, mental health and substance use care, disaster relief programs, and Community Health Centers.
Attorney General Tong and the coalition are asking the court to halt the new federal rules to ensure that illegals can continue to access some of the nation’s social services programs.
“Cutting off access to programs which provide vital health and education services to children and families in Connecticut is cruel and deeply destructive. All individuals - regardless of immigration status - who rely on these longstanding services will feel pain if these programs suddenly disappear," complained Attorney General Tong in a written statement. "The most basic responsibility of any government is to protect and aid its residents. When you deny access to affordable community-based healthcare, when you deny access to crucial early childhood education programs, and when you deny access to mental health services, you are abdicating that responsibility and needlessly putting lives in danger. We cannot and will not let the Trump Administration get away with this.”
At his press conference today, Tong bragged that this makes "over 25 cases" that Connecticut has launched and/or joined against the Trump Administration, out of some 40 or so cases that have been lodged against the Administration thus far.
If only Attorney General Tong fought that hard, for instance, for girls who have been physically and emotionally harmed by gender-confused boys playing in girls sports.
Or if only he chose to investigate the transgender activist trainer and transgender minister allegedly implicated in the suicide of a gender-confused girl from Connecticut.
Instead, Tong is fighting for illegals to have access to qualified community health centers, like Fair Haven.
“At Fair Haven Community Health Care, we believe health care is a basic human right. We are grateful to Attorney General Tong for his leadership, not only on behalf of our community, but for all Connecticut residents, in working to ensure that care remains accessible to all,” said the Chief Executive Officer of Fair Haven Community Health Care, Suzanne Lagarde.
Tong argued that federal statute requires Lagarde "to serve everybody" and said "she doesn't check their immigration status" because, as Tong chuckles, "frankly, she is not qualified -- she is a doctor and runs a health center -- she's not qualified to assess someone's immigration status."
Tong says he just wants to make sure that "people who come here" regardless of their immigration status apparently "have access to vital health care, not just to keep them safe, but to keep their neighbors and communities safe," totally gaslighting people over the fact that communities would actually be safer if criminal illegals weren't being shielded by the state's Trust Act.
Now, under the Trump Administration, Tong complains, the federal government all of a sudden wants to check immigration status before doling out government benefits when it has "never" done that before.
"And now they're going to make people like us, people who work here at Fair Haven, essentially perform federal immigration enforcement work," said Tong, whining that it is "not their charge" and they are "not qualified" to perform that kind of work at health centers -- the work of confirming eligibility for benefits.
“The Trump Administration’s cruel and inhumane hostility to our immigrant neighbors knows no bounds," piped in New Have Mayor Justin Elicker. "We want all our residents to be able to send their children to school, to be able to access life-saving healthcare services, and to be able get help in a time of crisis for themselves and their families. This lawsuit is critical to fighting back against the Trump Administration’s onslaught against our immigrant community and to ensuring that all our residents can access these services. I want to thank Attorney General Tong for once again leading the way in fighting for and defending our residents,” including illegals.
Elicker described the oh-so-difficult challenges of being a "welcoming city" under the Trump Administration.
"The reality is that our residents are under attack, and the Trump Administration is mischaracterizing and demonizing our residents, trying to end birthright citizenship, deploying ICE to conduct raids in inhumane and often illegal enforcement actions while masked and unidentified, creating terror among good hard-working people in our community, conducting deplorable acts of family separation," said Elicker, calling the Administration's actions "disgraceful" for daring to remove benefits from illegal aliens.
State Rep. Jillian Gilchrest took the mic to express outrage that the Trump Administration was "demonizing" a group of people who "just wanted to get healthcare for their children and themselves" -- on the American taxpayer's dime!
Gilchrest apparently thinks illegal aliens "deserve" healthcare no matter what.
State Senate Deputy Majority Leader Matt Lesser alleged that President Trump hoped to accomplish "his feverish hatred, his goal of demonizing, targeting and rounding up our nation's immigrants."
Yes, in case you didn't figure it out yet, the word of the day was "DEMONIZING".
Lesser went on to complain about how terrible it would be for health center workers to have to ask someone for a birth certificate or passport before obtaining a taxpayer funded service, and likened them to being like "Judge Dredd's -- judge, jury and executioner."
The coalition states alleged the new directives are "already causing major disruptions and putting state programs in impossible positions" of having to institute immigration verification measures, even though "some providers warn that they will not be able to change their practices no matter how much time and money they have to do so and therefore face closure."
In Connecticut, tens of millions of dollars’ worth of funding is at risk. Connecticut’s nine Community Action Agencies, which run Head Start, Meals on Wheels, food pantries, and a variety of other anti-poverty, employment, and training services, currently receive roughly $9 million each year in Community Services Block Grant (CSBG) funding.
These agencies "could potentially be forced to shut down while they attempt to navigate these new guidelines for verifying immigration status," according to Tong's statement, which also argues that communities will be harmed because "many of these programs" had been used to "prevent the spread of communicable disease."
The lawsuit argues that the federal government "acted unlawfully by issuing these changes without following required procedures under the Administrative Procedure Act, and by misapplying PRWORA (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act) to entire programs rather than to individual benefits. The changes also violate the Constitution’s Spending Clause by imposing new funding conditions on states without fair notice or consent."
The coalition is asking the court to declare the new rules unlawful, halt their implementation through preliminary and permanent injunctions, vacate the rules and restore the long-standing agency practice, and prevent the federal government from using PRWORA as a pretext to dismantle core safety net programs in the future.
Joining Attorney General Tong in filing this lawsuit, which was led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, Washington Attorney General Nick Brown, and Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha, are the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawai’i, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia.
You can watch the full press conference here.
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Treason. Nobody cried when Obama did the exact same thing except worse, metal cages and all. This is clearly TDS and acts against our elected leader. These CT idiots are going to screw CT voters out of $millions and lose federal funding. Guess who pays for everything. We do not support Tong. CT needs Doge cuts!