Last week, litigators from the Justice Action Center (JAC), the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), and the Innovation Law Lab, with Sidley Austin LLP, filed suit in the US District Court for the District of Oregon to halt implementation of the Trump administration’s requirements for immigrant visa applicants to demonstrate to consular officers at the time of the interview that they will have health insurance within thirty days of entry to the US or have sufficient financial means to cover reasonably foreseeable medical costs. In response to the suit, Judge Michael Simon of the Federal District Court in Portland, Oregon, issued a nationwide temporary restraining order preventing the government from enforcing the proclamation that was set to go into effect Sunday, November 3. The court will consider the merits of the suit, Doe vs. Trump, in the coming days and weeks.
Doe vs. Trump seeks to stop the federal government from implementing a policy that the suit says would potentially block up to 375,000 immigrants, mostly-family based applicants each year. This translates to “nearly two thirds of all prospective legal immigrants, mostly from predominantly nonwhite countries, from receiving visas and coming to the United States.” The lawsuit alleges that the policy “seeks to unilaterally rewrite this country’s immigration laws, imposing a new ground of inadmissibility that Congress has expressly rejected, and creating requirements that will be extremely difficult, or impossible, for most otherwise qualified immigrant visa applicants to satisfy.”
The suit highlights the damage the policy’s requirement would cause to the plaintiffs. One plaintiff, a disabled US citizen, has a Mexican national wife who has been granted a waiver of unlawful status, but must leave the US to attend her consular interview in Mexico. The family is extremely concerned that she could be prevented from returning to the US due to the policy’s healthcare requirements. Another US-citizen plaintiff could potentially enroll his wife under his employer’s healthcare plan once she obtains her permanent residency, but would not be able to do so within the thirty-day timeframe required in the policy. “Since Trump has been president, with all the laws and the hatred he has against immigrants, I personally feel violated,” the plaintiff said. “I truly wish and hope that something will change his mind on how his actions are affecting families of immigrants, U.S. citizens married to immigrants, and all of the children involved.” Litigators in the suit are seeking additional plaintiffs, specifically individuals with consular interviews scheduled for December 2019 and January 2020.
Esther Sung, a senior litigator at the Justice Action Center, welcomes the judge’s temporary restraining order. “We’re glad that the court understands the importance of preventing the health care ban from taking effect tonight, but this is just the first step,” she told the New York Times. “The impact of this ban is just huge. Hundreds of thousands of people would be affected…It’s outrageous that the Trump administration is trying to slip this by people without them noticing.”