Judge blocks Trump policy barring undocumented people from 'Head Start'

A federal judge has issued a nationwide block on a Trump administration directive that prevented children in the US illegally from enrolling in Head Start, a federally funded preschool programme.

Head Start associations in several states filed suit against the policy change by the US Department of Health and Human Services. The ruling by a federal judge in Washington state on Thursday comes after a coalition of 21 Democratic attorney generals succeeded in temporarily halting the policy's implementation within their own states.

With the new ruling, the policy is now on hold across the country.

In July, HHS proposed a rule reinterpretation to disallow immigrants in the country illegally from receiving certain social services, including Head Start and other community health programmes. Those programs were previously made accessible by a federal law in President Bill Clinton's administration.

The change was part of a broader Trump administration effort to exclude people without legal status from accessing social services by making changes to federal eligibility rules.

Those immigrants would be barred from accessing the impacted programmes because they would be reclassified as federal public benefits an alteration that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said could disincentivise illegal immigration. People in the country unlawfully are largely ineligible for federal public benefits, which include food stamps and student loans.