Trump Administration Threatens Billions in State Welfare Funding

Tyche Hendricks for KQED News:

"California is at risk of losing nearly $12 billion in federal funding for public assistance programs after the Trump administration threatened to cut off grants to states unless they report every known unauthorized immigrant to immigration authorities.

The threat came in the form of a new legal opinion . . . reinterpreting a 1990s welfare-reform law to mean that all agencies in states receiving welfare funding — which is every state in the nation — must report all `individuals known to be not lawfully present' to the federal government or risk losing grants that aid low-income people.

That’s a dramatic reversal from the Clinton-era interpretation of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which said that only state agencies administering the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs needed to provide information to federal immigration authorities. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office was defiant in its opposition to the threat."