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Washington finally said out loud what Connecticut’s political class has spent years pretending is optional.
On Wednesday, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion restoring the original meaning of the 1996 welfare-reform law: if a state takes Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) dollars, the entire state government — not just the welfare office — must report individuals it knows are not lawfully present to the Department of Homeland Security.
Connecticut takes the money. That is not in dispute. The state receives a TANF block grant on the order of $266 million a year and runs it as Temporary Family Assistance through the Department of Social Services. All 50 states participate. National TANF grants exceed $16.4 billion annually.
The Clinton-era 1998 opinion that Hartford and other blue capitals hid behind is gone. That memo claimed only the agencies cutting TANF or SSI checks had to talk to federal immigration authorities. OLC withdrew it. Congress defined “State” broadly in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. Accept the grant, accept the duty. Failure to comply, DOJ warned, can mean loss of program funding. The ruling is prospective. No retroactive penalties for years of looking the other way. Going forward, the statute means what it says.
“Congress wrote this requirement plainly,” said Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser. “When a state chooses to participate in TANF, it accepts the obligation to report illegal aliens in the United States. Tax dollars intended to help vulnerable Americans should not perversely encourage illegal entry into the United States, but rather should reinforce our laws and our borders.”
Deputy Assistant Attorney General Joshua Craddock, who authored the opinion, was just as blunt: this is not a new obligation. It is the old one, finally enforced. “States that accept TANF funding must abide by federal law.”
That is a problem for Connecticut — not because the law is ambiguous, but because Hartford built a political brand on treating federal immigration law as a suggestion, acting like federal immigration law does not apply to the "sovereign" state of Connecticut.
The state’s Trust Act already tells police and other officials to keep ICE at arm’s length unless a narrow set of conditions is met. Municipalities piled on, issuing their own "welcoming" declarations for illegals. In April, the Justice Department sued Connecticut, Governor Ned Lamont, Attorney General William Tong, New Haven, and Mayor Justin Elicker over sanctuary policies it says obstruct federal enforcement and have put dangerous offenders back on the street.
Tong has not been quiet. In August he joined a multi-state lawsuit attacking federal efforts to share TANF recipient data — including immigration status — with DHS, calling it an “unlawful power grab” and insisting Washington cannot “change the rules” to check who is actually eligible. In March he issued statewide guidance framing Connecticut as a protector of immigrant communities and denying the state is a sanctuary, even as the Trust Act does the work of one.
Those two positions cannot both survive this opinion. Either Connecticut reports known illegal aliens across state agencies because it takes TANF, or it keeps the Trust Act culture and dares HHS to pull the grant. There is no third option in which Hartford pockets the federal check and keeps hiding information about illegal aliens.
This is not a technical spat about forms. TANF was sold to the country as a work-and-responsibility program for needy American families with children. It was never meant to be a parallel social-service system that state agencies can run while refusing to tell the federal government when they encounter people here illegally. The 1998 workaround let Democratic administrations treat “known to be unlawfully present” as a problem for someone else’s desk. OLC just closed that loophole.
Connecticut taxpayers should ask a simple question of Lamont and Tong: if DSS, DMV, DCF, corrections, labor, and local partners already “know” those who are illegal, why has that knowledge not been going to DHS? And if the answer is the Trust Act, then the Trust Act is now in open conflict with the condition of the federal money Hartford spends.
The governor’s office will likely call this cruelty. Tong will likely call it a fishing expedition. The left-of-center press will likely call it politicizing poverty. None of that changes the statute.
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Decades of misspent billions of dollars-will this ruling be actually enforced? Citizens are being crushed by inflation and taxes to support Democrat nonsense in this state and are treated like second class servants while illegals are protected. End it now.