Judge Blocks Trump Admin From Ending Taxpayer-Funded Benefits for Illegal Aliens

A federal district judge on Sept. 21 blocked the Trump administration’s reinterpretation of a federal law to stop illegal aliens from receiving welfare.

Judge Mary McElroy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island said several federal agencies failed to comply with the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) when they skipped a notice-and-comment period required under the law.

The act governs how the federal government proposes, adopts, and enforces regulations.

But McElroy’s ruling did not prohibit federal agencies from undertaking their reinterpretation of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in the future in accordance with the APA’s required notice-and-comment period.

“In July 2025, [federal] agencies took an about-face by issuing new notices that purport to reinterpret PRWORA as applying to a swath of federal programs that had previously been excluded,” McElroy wrote.

“[The] agencies did not undertake any period of notice and comment before issuing the July 2025 PRWORA Notices.”

Federal agencies accused of failing to follow the APA’s guidelines include the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Department of Education, the Department of Labor, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and their respective secretaries.

Twenty states and the District of Columbia had sued over the Trump administration’s reinterpretation of PRWORA.

PRWORA was enacted by Congress in 1996 and established a “self-sufficiency” policy that said foreign nationals should be able to financially support themselves without relying on government assistance and that federal benefits should not be a magnet for immigration to the United States.

The legislation described “federal public benefits” as “any grant, contract, loan, professional license, or commercial license … any retirement, welfare, health, disability, public or assisted housing, postsecondary education, food assistance, unemployment benefit, or any other similar benefit for which payments or assistance are provided to an individual, household, or family eligibility unit by an agency of the United States.”

Illegal immigrants were prohibited from receiving benefits that fall under that definition.

But there were also exemptions for some welfare programs, which would be specified by the attorney general and appropriate federal agencies.

After PRWORA’s enactment, federal agencies issued notices interpreting which welfare programs would be exempt.

The Department of Justice at the time construed the statute as not applying to “widely available services,” specifying programs such as victim services, short-term homeless centers, and soup kitchens as being exempt.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development and the attorney general determined that “many” programs within the agency do not fall under PRWORA.

Similarly, the Department of Labor issued guidance—as recently as 2024—that a number of programs are not covered by the act.

The attorney general, along with the Education Department and HHS, likewise issued notices interpreting “PRWORA as not applying to certain categories of education programs.”

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in July 2025 that PRWORA’s definition of benefits was insufficient and allowed illegal aliens to obtain welfare that lawmakers intended for Americans and qualified immigrants.

“For too long, the government has diverted hardworking Americans’ tax dollars to incentivize illegal immigration,” Kennedy said.

“Today’s action changes that—it restores integrity to federal social programs, enforces the rule of law, and protects vital resources for the American people.”

President Donald Trump had sought to reverse the decades-old trend by broadening the scope of welfare programs under PRWORA, which would thus become unavailable to illegal aliens.

Trump signed an executive order on Feb. 19, 2025 titled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Open Borders,” directing federal agencies to align their programs with PRWORA.

In response, the four aforementioned agencies issued new notices of the 1996 law that “narrowed their interpretations of other exemptions, and identified newly covered federal public benefits.”

Twenty states and Washington sued against PRWORA’s reinterpretation and requested a preliminary injunction, which McElroy granted in September 2025, pending a further order from her.

“The government argues that it has somehow interpreted this statute incorrectly for the nearly 30 years that it has been the law,” she said in the September 2025 decision.

“In its view, everyone (from every past administration) has misunderstood it from the start—at least until last month, when the right way to read it became clear to the government.”

McElroy’s final decision on Sept. 21, finding that the agency’s actions were procedurally invalid under the APA, came more than a year after she granted her preliminary injunction.

But the judge reiterated that her ruling does not block the health, education, labor, or housing departments from “promulgating new rules related to PRWORA after a period of notice-and-comment rulemaking as required under the APA.”