New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York Attorney General Letitia James announce a lawsuit challenging the federal government's new public charge rule on Sept. 14, 2026, in New York. AP Photo/Ryan Murphy See more of our coverage in your search results.
Add The New York Post on Google Mayor Zohran Mamdani and state Attorney General Tish James are fighting to let noncitizen immigrants soak up every possible dime of welfare with no risk to their visa status because . . . well, because.
The deranged duo is joining 21 other state AGs in suing the Trump administration for tightening up the “public charge” rules that require new Americans to stand on their own two feet.
Immigrants, the administration holds, should not become “primarily dependent” on the government for survival — a principle that’s guided American attitudes on this issue since forever.
As evidence that Trump is upending a century of “law and history,” Mamdani and James quote the Emma Lazarus poem “The New Colossus,” which “welcome[ed] ‘your tired, your poor, your huddled masses’” as supposedly showing that this nation has always been a global soup kitchen.
The rule in the Ellis Island days was to deny entry to anyone deemed “liable to become a public charge” — including the sick and the disabled or elderly with no family to care for them.
And this was back in the 1880s, when the government offered virtually nothing in the way of social services and also no other immigration restrictions.
Today, enterprising newcomers — especially in resource-rich states like New York — can sign up for food stamps, free or deeply subsidized housing, Medicaid and a host of other entitlement programs, but federal law still sought to limit immigrants’ dependency . . . until President Joe Biden.
That’s when Democrats, gone mad with open-borders ideology, redefined “dependency” so that even someone who gets 100% of his or her support directly from government handouts wouldn’t count as a public charge.
Of course Democrats want to import new feeders at the welfare trough: Growing government and government dependency is the only kind of growth they know.
That they believe importing welfare cases is just and reasonable is just another sign of how deeply they’ve lost themselves in extremist lunacy.
