The White House is finalizing a proposal to penalize legal immigrants who’ve used public benefits programs, including Obamacare, children’s health insurance, food stamps, and the earned income tax credit. The brainchild of senior White House advisor-cum-lizard-person Stephen Miller, the plan would vastly expand the existing “public charge” provision, a law dating back to 1882 that stipulates that immigrants seeking a visa can be denied on the basis that they would need public assistance, and make it more difficult for immigrants who’ve used public benefits programs in the past to obtain green cards and citizenship.

Like the separation of children from families at the border, this would be an act of immeasurable cruelty. As the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) reports, numerous immigrant families have already unenrolled from critical healthcare and nutrition programs out of fear. The proposed regulation forces parents to make an “impossible choice,” said NILC Executive Director Marielena Hincapié in a statement, “between feeding their children, giving them healthcare, and having a future in this country.”

It would be easy to see this development as just the latest example of Miller’s exceptional ghoulishness or the far-right extremism of Trump’s racist “America First” immigration policy. But in the arc of US immigration policy, this proposal is not new. It draws on a long, bipartisan history of weaponizing the welfare state to police the border and terrorize poor and working-class immigrants — “legal” and “illegal” alike.