A US District Court in Oregon on Saturday granted a temporary injunction preventing the administration from implementing the new health insurant requirement that it had announced in a Presidential Proclamation on October 4, 2019.

In response to litigation launched by the American Immigration Lawyers’ Association (“AILA”), the Justice Action Center (“JAC”) and the Innovative Law Lab, the court granted a Temporary Restraining Order stopping implementation of the policy while the litigation moves forward.

The proclamation would have required those applying for immigrant visas to demonstrate access to “approved plan” health insurance within 30 days of the foreign national’s entry into the United States on an immigrant visa, or unless the foreign national possesses the financial resources to pay for reasonably foreseeable medical costs.  Several types of insurance were listed in the Proclamation as “approved plans” but specifically excluded Medicare or any subsidized plan.

It remained unclear how the administration would have defined the required evidence of an approved plan, what “reasonably foreseeable” medical costs might be defined, or how “sufficient funds” would have been defined.