You gotta give Zohran Mamdani some credit. He’s a true believer when it comes to his embrace of socialism, and he doesn’t seem to mind exposing the party to which he most closely aligns to tout his love for other people’s money.
New York City’s mayor announced Monday that he is suing the Trump administration over the new “public charge rule” — the one taking effect Friday that lets immigration officers weigh whether a green-card applicant is likely to end up living on taxpayer benefits. He has assembled the expected coalition: Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Santa Clara County, King County. The all-star team of left-wing America-destroying governance.
His case against the rule is that up to four million people nationwide could drop off public health programs, 1.8 million of them children. He warned that people could die. He called it a vehicle for cruelty and declared that “cruelty is not how we seek to govern.” Read that number again, because Mamdani just testified for the other side and doesn’t appear to have noticed.
Mamdani announces that he's suing the Trump admin over the new rule that allows them to deny green cards to foreigners who are likely to rely on welfare.
Says that "four million people will unenroll from their healthcare" and that "people will die" if more green cards aren't… pic.twitter.com/EJQ4k0zmyB
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 14, 2026
Four million. That is his estimate, offered as an indictment, of how many people connected to the green-card pipeline are currently drawing on programs funded by American workers. He is not disputing the premise of the rule. He is confirming it, at a podium, with visual aids. The administration’s argument is that large-scale immigration into an expansive welfare state produces mass dependency. Mamdani’s rebuttal is that mass dependency exists and must be protected. That is not a counterargument. That is a confession with a press release attached. And you just know a hefty number of these recipients are no longer in the country legally.
And understand what is actually being enforced here, because the word “cruelty” is doing heroic work. The public charge standard is not an invention of Trump White House adviser Stephen Miller. It has been in American immigration law since the 1880s, resting on a proposition so obvious it once required no defense: a nation may decline to import poverty. Every sponsor of a legal immigrant already signs a binding affidavit promising to support that person financially. The rule simply asks whether that promise is likely to be kept.
Nobody is being deported (yet). No citizenis losing a benefit. A foreign national applying for the privilege — not the right, the privilege — of permanent residence in the United States is being asked to demonstrate he will contribute more than he consumes. In what universe is that cruelty? My grandparents would have been insulted by the suggestion that anyone expected otherwise.
And for the record, every other civilized society on the planet has the very same rule. If you think you, as an American, can go to another country and live off their taxpayers, boy, have you been misinformed.
Mamdani says immigrants are New Yorkers, and that to get to any of them you have to get through all of them. Stirring. But they’re not; they’re immigrants living in New York. That’s a big difference. If they were “New Yorkers,” they’d be American citizens first, and, if they qualified, eligible for benefits. ‘Resident’ doesn’t equate to ‘citizen.’ Never has, never will.
Two honest notes. The earlier version of this rule spent years in court and drew mixed results, so this suit isn’t frivolous and the administration should expect a fight. And the chilling-effect concern — citizen children in mixed-status households dropping coverage out of fear — is real, and the fix is clear communication about who the rule actually covers, not the abandonment of any standard whatsoever.
But the core of it is simple, and every working family in this country understands it instinctively. Immigration should be a competition we win: the ambitious, the skilled, the people who came here to build something. That was the American bargain for two centuries. Mamdani’s objection is that the bargain might finally be enforced. He’ll lose that argument everywhere outside the five boroughs — and possibly inside them too.
