The Summit County government is lobbying against legislation that would require local officials to verify the immigration status of individuals seeking public benefits, including immunizations and food pantry assistance.
“It’s hard to imagine what this would look like if it were put into law,” said Summit County Councilor Megan McKenna. “Requiring public health officials or nonprofit employees to verify citizenship would be a tremendous burden, not only on staff and the resources required to do that, but because it asks people to deny services. … Asking them to deny people in need of assistance, whether it’s public health or food, is just cruel.”
House Bill 88 is sponsored by Rep. Trevor Lee, a Republican who represents Davis County. If it became law, health officials and anyone else administering public benefits would be mandated to verify a person is legally in the United States before offering any relief.
McKenna said the county was monitoring the bill in its early stages, but the Utah Association of Counties this week officially opposed the legislation after an updated version became public. The move was in part due to a recommendation from the association’s Social and Human Services Policy Steering Committee, which McKenna serves on as one of its two co-chairs.
“Oftentimes, if something doesn’t make it through committee, they’ll come back with something that might be a little more palatable,” McKenna said. “But in this case, the second substitution is even worse.”
The latest version of the bill would remove all exceptions to the verification requirements, including health emergencies, immunizations, treatments for communicable diseases and assistance from both nonprofit and government-run food pantries.
Summit County Health Director Phil Bondurant said the bill, if enacted, would likely impact the department’s operations because of the additional time it would take staff to check in patients. He said there’s also a possibility that the Health Department would be responsible for purchasing new equipment or sending staff to training sessions to comply with the law.
“It puts our Health Department staff in a space where they are now not focused primarily on serving people because we’re qualifying each interaction against an immigration standard or a citizenship standard,” Bondurant said.
The bill would also classify failing to verify a person’s immigration status or failing to maintain verification records as a class B misdemeanor, meaning staff members could be charged with a crime if they were to not follow the proper protocol.
“When we were discussing this in our committee, one of my counterparts in another county asked if this was even constitutional,” McKenna said. “I think that’s an important question to ask right now.”
McKenna and Bondurant said they were concerned about how the bill would affect the community’s view of and willingness to engage in Health Department and county services if it were to pass.
“Our most vulnerable populations wouldn’t have the services that they rely on,” McKenna said. “If we had to implement this sort of regulation, I think it would undermine all of that trust that every department across the county government has tried to work toward.”
The inability to serve all individuals in Summit County could have long-term consequences on public health along the Wasatch Back, too, McKenna said, especially if the bill bars people from seeking care or discourages residents from making appointments.
“It puts public employees and our nonprofit employees in a really difficult situation,” McKenna said. “It’s very problematic, and it creates division in a time when we need to come together as a community and support one another. There’s already so much fear and anxiety in our communities right now, and this doesn’t help.”
H.B. 88 is currently under consideration in the state House of Representatives’ Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Committee. It will move to the House floor for a vote if the committee is in favor of the bill’s latest version, although there is no indication of when the committee will take another look at the legislation as of Thursday afternoon.
The general session ends on March 6.