NEW YORK — This edit wasn’t taken well. A Trump administration official’s rewrite of a famous poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty drew a backlash from leaders in the iconic sculpture’s home state.
Ken Cuccinelli, the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, tweaked Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus” in a Tuesday radio interview defending the Trump administration’s so-called public charge rule. The measure will restrict access to green cards for immigrants who use government benefits such as food stamps.
“Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public charge,” Cuccinelli said on NPR’s “Morning Edition.”
The conservative official made the remark when asked whether Lazarus’s poem is part of the nation’s ethos. The actual line from the 1883 poem says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Lazarus wrote the poem around the same time that the federal government established the first public charge rule aiming to ensure that immigrants coming to the United States would not rely on taxpayer funds, Cuccinelli argued.
He doubled down on his interpretation in a Tuesday evening interview on CNN, saying Lazarus was referring specifically to European immigrants.
“That poem was referring back to people coming from Europe, where they had class-based societies where people were considered wretched if they weren’t in the right class,” Cuccinelli said, adding that Congress expanded the public charge doctrine in 1903, the year the poem was added to the Statue of Liberty.
But Democratic officials in New York weren’t having it. They said Cuccinelli’s revisions to the iconic verse were antithetical to its true meaning.
“This is not what the Statue of Liberty is about,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat who’s also running for president, said on Twitter. “These comments are outrageous, as is this proposed policy, which would only punish and demonize immigrants.”
City Council Speaker Corey Johnon said Cuccinelli’s comments were “what we can expect from an Administration weaponizing programs meant to help people.”
“Ken Cuccinelli should be ashamed of himself, but it’s clear he has no conscience,” Johnson said in a tweet.
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office issued a simple response, sharing most of the second stanza from Lazarus’s poem “(i)n case there was any confusion.”
City and state officials have pledged to fight the Trump administration’s public charge rule, which was published in the Federal Register on Wednesday. They worry the measure may force immigrants to choose between pursuing permanent residency in the U.S. and accessing benefits to which they are legally entitled.