The United States House of Representatives and more than a dozen professors and scholars of immigration law submitted two “friend of the court” briefs in support of the Plaintiff’s motion for summary judgment in Baltimore v. Trump, a lawsuit seeking to set aside the State Department’s unlawful policies expanding the public charge ground for denying visas to immigrants.

The amici forcefully argue that the State Department’s new public charge definition deviates from over a hundred years of interpretation of the term and unlawfully exceeds the State Department’s authority. The two filings follow the court’s decision last September rejecting the Trump administration’s attempt to dismiss the case, which, at the time, focused only on changes to the public charge provision in the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual (FAM).

The two briefs, filed on Friday, urge the court to invalidate the State Department’s public charge policies. The motion for summary judgment was filed on May 15, 2020, and the House and law professors’ amicus briefs were filed on May 22, 2020.