DOJ moves to boot short-term immigrants from ‘Obama phone’ program
by Stephen Dinan · The Washington TimesThe Justice Department has issued a new legal ruling concluding that the Lifeline program to provide phones for the indigent — which gained fame as “Obama phones” — is subject to normal welfare rules limiting the ability of immigrants to sign up.
Legal migrants must have been in the U.S. for at least five years to sign up, the Office of Legal Counsel ruled. Illegal immigrants were already supposed to be barred.
The program helps pay for phones and voice and data plans for those hovering around the federal poverty line, or who receive another qualifying form of public assistance.
Until now, the program, run by the Federal Communications Commission, didn’t require citizenship or immigration status checks, but merely a Social Security number.
Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser said in the opinion that migrants may have a Social Security number for various reasons, and it isn’t a good yardstick for whether someone has a viable immigration status for the phone program.
“The government should not be spending the money of hard-working Americans to provide phone and Internet service for ineligible recipients,” FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said. “Today’s opinion from the Department will go a long way in putting an end to this kind of abuse.”
More than 8 million people had Lifeline phones as of December.
The Lifeline program has existed since the 1980s, and was intended to help homeless and poor Americans have a landline phone.
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It expanded to pay for cell phones in the George W. Bush administration.
But the program gained significant public attention — and notoriety — in the Obama administration, when a woman in Cleveland went viral in a video urging people to reelect Barack Obama, saying she and all her friends “got Obamaphones.”
“Keep Obama in president,” the woman says. “He gave us a phone.”
“You sign up if you’re on food stamps, you’re on Social Security, you got low income, you’re disability,” she said in the video.
The program is funded by the Universal Service Fund, a fee paid by telecommunications providers, who then pass the charge on to consumers.
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Stephen Dinan
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