San Francisco and Santa Clara Join Mamdani Suit to Block Trump’s Public Charge Green Card Rule

San Francisco and Santa Clara County have signed onto a New York City–led lawsuit seeking to stop a Trump administration immigration rule that would let federal officers weigh food stamps, Medicaid, housing aid and other means-tested benefits when deciding whether an immigrant is likely to become a “public charge,” and therefore ineligible for a green card. The city-and-county complaint was filed Monday in the Southern District of New York.

Public charge is a term that immigration authorities use when determining whether a noncitizen applying to enter the U.S. or obtain lawful permanent residency (Green Card) is likely to be primarily dependent on government benefits for support.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the coalition as Chicago, Seattle, King County, San Francisco and Santa Clara County. A separate multi-state suit, co-led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, was filed the same day.

https://t.co/PaQsV1mwtT
Mayor Mamdani Holds Press Conference on a Major Immigration Announcement with New York Attorney General Letitia James

— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) September 14, 2026

The Department of Homeland Security rule rescinds the Biden-era 2022 public-charge regulation and takes effect September 18. USCIS guidance says officers may consider “any and all” means-tested benefits received on or after that date, not only cash welfare and long-term institutional care. Family members’ benefits, including those used by U.S. citizen children, can also be factored into the totality-of-the-circumstances review. 

Mamdani framed the fight as a solidarity campaign. “To get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us,” he said in remarks circulating Monday. In a written statement he added that the rule “seeks to push immigrant families away from the programs that have kept people fed and healthy for decades” and that “our immigrant communities are not a burden.” He called the policy “cruel and unlawful.” 

Make the Road New York Health Programs Director Arlene Cruz Escobar followed him at the rotunda. She said the rule would hit immigrant families’ health and economic stability in New York and nationwide. Cruz Escobar made the same case in 2019, when Make the Road sued over the first Trump public-charge regulation and she described it as a shift from a family-based system to a wealth test. San Francisco and Santa Clara, which filed the first city-county case that year, are now back in the coalition Mamdani is leading.

Make the Road New York is not a bit player at these pressers. It is the state’s largest immigrant-membership organizing shop, with centers in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, Long Island, and Westchester and a new 24,000-square-foot Corona headquarters. The 501(c)(3) mixes legal aid, health navigation, adult education, and political organizing (for Democrats). Cruz Escobar’s health program is built to put families on Medicaid-equivalent coverage, SNAP, and clinic care—and to tell them those programs will not cost them a green card. The new federal guidance undercuts their mission.

Attorney General Bonta used similar language in his press release. “No family should have to choose between accessing healthcare and nutrition assistance today — or protecting their pathway to a green card tomorrow,” the attorney general said. He accused the administration of rewriting more than a century of immigration law and giving officers “the discretion and power to punish families for lawfully accessing certain public benefits.” 

San Francisco and Santa Clara filed the first lawsuit in the country against the first Trump public-charge rule in August 2019, won a preliminary injunction in the Northern District of California, and later dismissed the case after the Biden administration rescinded the 2019 regulation. They are now back in court over a successor policy that, unlike the 2019 rule, is implemented largely through a rescission plus USCIS policy guidance rather than a detailed new list of countable benefits. 

That legal history is why the California jurisdictions matter more than their place on Mamdani’s press-release list. 

Santa Clara is the heart of Silicon Valley; San Francisco remains a sanctuary city with large caseloads in Medi-Cal, CalFresh and local housing programs because of the large legal and illegal immigrant population. Both governments have long argued that a broader public-charge test produces a “chilling effect”: mixed-status households drop off benefits they are legally allowed to use, public-health costs shift onto county hospitals, and federal matching funds decline. The states’ complaint makes the same fiscal claim at scale: that fear-driven disenrollment would cost governments billions. 

The Trump administration’s position is the opposite: Congress wrote the public-charge bar into the Immigration and Nationality Act, self-sufficiency is the statutory policy, and the 2022 rule boxed officers into an artificially narrow test. USCIS said the new guidance “aligns with congressional intent that aliens in the United States be self-sufficient and not dependent on taxpayer-funded government benefits.” 

Benefits received before September 18 are still judged under the old cash-and-institutional-care standard. Applications filed before that date are not supposed to be scored under the new framework. 

Mamdani, the Uganda-born Democratic Socialist, naturalized in 2018 and sworn in as New York’s mayor in January, has become a national target for Republicans and a fundraising magnet on the left. 

California Globe previously published commentary arguing there were legal grounds to examine his naturalization file, citing Democratic Socialists of America membership and old rap lyrics referencing the Holy Land Five, a case that produced Hamas-financing convictions. Those claims have not been tested in a denaturalization proceeding. They are now part of the atmosphere around any Mamdani-led immigration lawsuit. 

California’s exploding budget provides the other half of the context. The Globe has reported the state’s large and growing outlays for “newcomer” students, immigrant health coverage and local benefit navigation, including a $350 million CalNEW school program in this year’s budget fight, at the same time Washington is trying to make green-card decisions turn, in part, on whether an applicant is likely to keep drawing those programs. 

San Francisco’s Human Services Agency has already posted public-charge Q&As warning that after September 18, Medi-Cal, CalFresh, WIC, school meals and housing assistance “may” be considered. 

The lawsuits ask courts to declare the rescission and guidance unlawful under the Administrative Procedure Act—exceeding statutory authority, arbitrary and capricious, and a break from the historic meaning of “public charge” as primary, long-term dependence. The administration matinains it has full authority to stop treating a green card as compatible with ongoing SNAP or Medicaid use.

A federal judge in New York will get the first crack at that argument before the rule’s Friday effective date. The midterms will decide which version of this fight wins.

Trump’s rule says a green card is not a ticket onto the American welfare state: if you need SNAP, Medicaid, or housing aid to get by, the taxpayers who already live here should not have to underwrite your permanent status. Mamdani, Bonta, San Francisco, Santa Clara, and the groups on that City Hall stage say the opposite—that counting those benefits is “cruel,” that immigrant communities “are not a burden,” and that fear of losing a green card is itself the harm.

That is the real ballot question underneath the lawsuits. Either public benefits remain a back door into permanent residency, or they are reserved first for citizens and for people who can stand on their own.