The Trump administration has instructed US consular officers to more closely scrutinise the long-term health needs of visa applicants and to deny entry if they believe those individuals could become a financial burden due to costly medical care in the United States.
The guidance, first reported by KFF Health News, notes a huge expansion of the “public charge” rule.
This new directive, however, now allows consular officers to consider a range of non-communicable health conditions, including diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, obesity, metabolic disorders, certain cancers, neurological issues, and mental health conditions, when deciding visa eligibility.
The cable explicitly states that these illnesses could require “expensive, long-term care,” and may therefore justify a visa denial.
“The Trump administration has brought an end to the era of mass immigration,” a State Department official told Fox News after what they described as “Biden’s disastrous open borders agenda.”
US visa officers granted ‘broad discretion’ to deny applicants over subjective health judgments
However, immigration lawyers argue that this new directive grants visa officers broad discretionary power to make subjective or speculative judgments.
Charles Wheeler of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network told KFF Health News that the directive seems to “contradict the Foreign Affairs Manual,” which discourages officers from denying applications based on hypothetical medical scenarios.
“That’s troubling,” Wheeler said, adding that consular officers are “not medical professionals” and could end up making decisions based on “what if scenarios.”
So, now, applicants must also prove they can afford any necessary medical treatment privately, without relying on US public benefits, per CBS News.
Immigrants already undergo thorough medical examinations by State Department-approved physicians but immigration attorney Sophia Genovese of Georgetown University warned that this new directive could transform those screenings into broader evaluations of “lifetime medical costs.”
She noted that the rule is “going to cause a myriad of issues when people are going into their consular interviews.”
