Trump admin sued over "show me your papers" policy for Head Start: "This is not America"
More than 20 AGs, including Rob Bonta in California, fight back against a Trump admin directive restricting public benefits for immigrants.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta will discuss the latest of the 34 lawsuits his office filed against the Trump administration on a Substack Live today with me on All Rise News.
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Nearly two dozen attorneys general filed a federal lawsuit seeking to void the Trump administration’s latest “cruel” directive restricting immigrants from accessing soup kitchens, substance abuse clinics, Head Start or 10 other programs helping needy families in the United States.
“For the first time, millions of people are facing a new demand before they can access the nation’s most essential programs: ‘show me your papers,’” the 50-page lawsuit states. “This is not America, and it is not the law.”
The jurisdictions behind the lawsuit are New York, Washington, Rhode Island, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, Wisconsin and Washington, D.C.
An “impossible choice”
The lawsuit asks a federal judge to void the Trump administration’s stingy reinterpretation of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, a statute that restricted immigrants’ access to Medicaid and food stamps — but previously, never “vital community programs.”
“The hungry have never needed to produce government identification to enter a soup kitchen or food bank; parents have never needed to produce their children’s citizenship or immigration records before enrolling them in Head Start; those suffering from substance abuse disorders have never needed to bring their passports to a rehabilitation clinic; people facing homelessness or domestic violence have never needed proof of immigration status to walk into a shelter,” the lawsuit notes.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D), one of the coalition members behind the lawsuit, ripped the Trump administration for targeting “working moms and their young children.”
“We’re not talking about waste, fraud, and abuse, we’re talking about programs that deliver essential childcare, healthcare, nutrition, and education assistance, programs that have for decades been open to all because we understand that we are better off when everyone has the chance to succeed,” Bonta said in a statement, noting that the cuts go against three decades of precedent.
States stand to lose billions in federal funding for violations, leaving their programs with the “impossible choice” between shutting their doors or quickly drying up their coffers.
“Many programs cannot realistically conduct verification at the door, such as 24/7 crisis hotlines, emergency services for individuals suffering an overdose, and homeless shelters,” the lawsuit notes, describing the fallout of the policy change as “chaos.”
The AGs sued the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, the Department of Labor, and the leaders of those agencies.
“They may close entirely”
Attorney General Bonta’s office has been especially prolific in lawsuits against the Trump administration, filing 34 in the last six months by his office’s count.
Beyond their raw numbers, Bonta’s lawsuits have tackled issues at the heart of the national conversation. His lawsuit over Trump’s deployment of the National Guard on the civilian streets of Los Angeles will be heading to trial next month between Mon, Aug. 11 and Weds., Aug 13, which will determine whether the administration has been violating the Posse Comitatus Act.
Earlier this year, Bonta sued over Trump’s unilateral imposition of tariffs in a lawsuit that spotlighted the effect of those levies on California, which has the world’s fifth largest economy. Though the lawsuit stumbled on jurisdictional grounds, Bonta’s litigation drew attention to how just four of Trump’s tariffs affected more than 40 percent of the state’s imports and wrought havoc on the state’s agricultural sector, which grows 76 percent of the world’s almonds, according to the complaint. (A federal appeals court will consider the legality of Trump’s tariffs in a separate case next week.)
In his latest lawsuit, Bonta highlights the outsized impact Trump’s policy change has for the country’s most populous state.
“In 2023-24, California’s 100 direct Head Start regional recipients served over 80,345 children and families at 1,842 individual site locations,” his press release states.
The Trump administration gave the states only 30 days to conform to the new policy by Aug. 15, ratcheting up the urgency for quick judicial relief.
“Some programs, such as Head Start Centers, are unlikely to be able to implement verification programs at all because the time and expense is too great for their overburdened services to bear, such that they may close entirely,” the states wrote in a motion seeking an injunction.
The states quickly filed their request for a preliminary injunction under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), a law forbidding “arbitrary and capricious” government actions.
Read the lawsuit here, and watch the interview with Attorney General Bonta at 11:30 a.m. Pacific Time (2:30 p.m. Eastern Time). The link to the interview will be here.
Thank God for the court. This administration is made up of cruel barbaric unsympathetic baboons. Is all this cruelty coming out of the Heritage Foundations 2025 agenda??
Legal news is the only good news these days, in the form of lawsuits against this lawless administration.