Challenging Public Charge Policy: Coalitional Immigrant Community Strategies

As part of the anti-immigrant fervor in the 1990s, the state of California initiated a series of border enforcement programs that targeted immigrant women’s access to prenatal care. Using public charge policy, the state Department of Health Services (DHS) and federal immigration authorities worked to deter low-income immigrant women from accessing health services by defining immigrant women as public burdens. This paper focuses on the successful immigrant community challenge to these programs, which incorporated a coalition of Latino/a and Asian immigrant organizations to provide a powerful, alternative narrative that articulates the state’s irresponsibility and illegality in their relationship with immigrants.