Vito Corleone built an empire on one rule: take my money and play by my terms. On September 1, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel decided the federal government could use the same playbook with the roughly $16.4 billion a year it sends states through welfare programs. The message to every state agency cashing a Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or Supplemental Security Income check is simple. Report the people you know are here illegally to Homeland Security or start looking for a new revenue stream.

Congress wrote this reporting duty into law in 1996, buried inside the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. Two years later, the Clinton administration's Office of Legal Counsel read the word “State” in that statute to mean only the specific agency that cuts the TANF or SSI check, not the state government as a whole. The new opinion throws that reading out. The DOJ now reads “State” the way Congress actually defined it in the statute's own text: the sovereign entity, meaning every component agency inside it, from the motor vehicle department to the prison system to the public school district, if that agency happens to know someone in its files is not here lawfully. TANF sends cash assistance to low-income families, and SSI sends monthly payments to low-income seniors and people with disabilities; Congress attached the identical reporting string to both programs in the same law.

The reporting duty runs on what a state agency already knows. A formal removal order counts, and so does a DHS notification, an individual's own admission of unlawful........

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