On Saturday, November 2, only one day before the Trump-Miller ban on immigrants seeking permanent residence who cannot afford to buy prohibitively expensive private medical insurance would have gone into effect, a federal district judge in Oregon put a 28-day hold on this latest move to keep nonwhite immigrants out of the United States. The medical insurance ban, coming on top of the new public charge rule, which would have expanded the definition of public charge far beyond anything known before in the long history of this exclusion ground, and which has also been blocked by no less than three federal district court judges, are only the latest example of Trump's bigoted and lawless immigration agenda.

In his temporary restraining order, Judge Michael Simon noted that the requirement to purchase expensive private medical insurance as a condition of obtaining a green card would disproportionately affect mainly family-based immigrants from Africa, Asia and Latin America. A report on and link to the decision is available at Axios:

https://www.axios,com/trump-health-insurance-immigrants-rule-blocked-877c5a29-b15f-41c5-8777-733e9ca376e6.html

This latest attempt is only one of many actions that Trump and Stephen Miller have taken to skew the entire legal immigration system toward admitting only immigrants from predominately white European countries, and against legal immigrants from other parts of the world, in a regression toward the 1924 immigration act's openly racist "Nordic's-only" system which was abolished in 1965 but which some of Trump's white nationalist supporters would like to bring back in one form or another.

Taken separately and together, these actions by Trump and Miller constitute an unlawful usurpation of Congressional power over immigration by the executive branch and an attempt to subvert America's democracy.

Therefore, every court victory, every time that a deserving, qualified immigrant succeeds in receiving a green card, a visa, or temporary non-immigrant permission in today's hostile, RFE-dominated administrative environment from a USCIS agency run by an avowed Trump supporter and immigration opponent, Ken Cuccinelli, is also a victory for the survival of democracy in America.

Our democracy is under attack in many different ways from Donald Trump and his regime - not least in his and his supporters' latest attempts to stonewall and subvert the impeachment investigation against him - which far from being "sham" or "fraudulent", is a prime example of Congress exercising its Constitutional powers.

It is high time for the Democratic leaders to overcome their hesitation and timidity against broadening the impeachment investigations to include Trump's attempts to use anti-immigrant hatred and abuse of executive power - of which the private insurance ban and public charge rules are only the latest examples - as a means to overthrow democracy in America and seize absolute power for himself.

Roger Algase
Attorney at Law