The Trump administration rarely ignores an opportunity to push their racism. In the recent Coronavirus financial relief package that Congress passed and the president signed into law, there’s a provision that seemingly excludes individuals married to undocumented immigrants from eligibility for the $1,200 assistance checks that have been designated for Americans across the country. The provision says that in order for couples who jointly file taxes to be eligible, both individuals must have Social Security numbers, which undocumented immigrants do not have. Now, an anonymous man using the pseudonym of John Doe has sued the president over the exclusion.
‘President Donald Trump was sued over a provision of the coronavirus relief package that could deny $1,200 stimulus checks to more than 1 million Americans married to immigrants without Social Security Numbers. The suit was filed Friday by an Illinois man using the pseudonym John Doe, who seeks to represent all others in his position… Doe says he is married to an immigrant who pays taxes and files tax returns with an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, which is issued by the Internal Revenue Service.’
The plaintiff in the case says that the relief legislation perpetrates discrimination against him “based solely on whom he chose to marry,” and the idea is that the discrimination would also extend against to the many other families in the U.S. that include undocumented immigrants. Besides Trump personally, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin are also named as defendants in the lawsuit.
This situation is not the first time that the Trump administration has sought to arbitrarily exclude the families of undocumented immigrants from government assistance, no matter the taxes that those undocumented immigrants may themselves pay. The Dr. Ben Carson-led Department of Housing and Urban Development, for instance, sought to kick out any family with a single undocumented member from government-supported housing.
In the present Coronavirus pandemic, the president has also implemented a 60-day ban on new green cards, although exceptions are in place for groups like so-called essential workers. Trump explained the overall policy as designed to reduce supposedly undue competition from foreign workers as the U.S. tries to recover from the pandemic, but this week, Trump’s longtime adviser Stephen Miller admitted that the green card suspension actually figured in the administration’s broader immigration policy, which isn’t exactly surprising. Miller insisted that “the most important thing is to turn off the faucet of new immigrant labor.”
Rep. Tony Cárdenas (D-Calif.) noted:
‘Stephen Miller somehow, someway convinces President Donald Trump to constantly go to immigration as an issue, regardless of the policy matter we’re trying to address.’
Overall, Trump has frequently devolved into baseless theorizing amidst formulating the government response to the pandemic. Just this past week, he even suggested that injecting household disinfectants might be worth looking into as a treatment plan for the Coronavirus. As should go without saying, there’s no evidence of this, and Trump eventually claimed he was being sarcastic — but that excuse is not credible, based on his own previous repeated defenses of his remarks.
