A federal judge in Seattle has stopped the Trump administration from cutting Medicaid for more than 800 lawfully present immigrants in Washington who receive Supplemental Security Income. The September 30 preliminary injunction by U.S. District Judge Thomas Zilly bars the Department of Health and Human Services from terminating federal Medicaid funding for any qualified noncitizen SSI recipient in the state, one day before the October 1 cutoff that removed refugees, asylees and other lawful immigrants from Medicaid nationwide.
SSI is the federal cash benefit for people 65 and older, blind or disabled who have almost no income, so the protected group is largely elderly and disabled immigrants who depend on daily care and prescriptions. The roughly 11,000 other Washington immigrants who lost Apple Health on October 1 are not covered by the order.
The Cutoff and the 1997 Law
H.R. 1, the July 2025 budget law, removed refugees, asylees, trafficking survivors, humanitarian parolees and most other lawful immigrants without green cards from federal Medicaid as of October 1. The site’s state-by-state guide covers who was affected where.
In April 2026 the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued guidance telling states to apply the same cutoff to immigrants who receive SSI. That is where the lawsuit found an opening. The 1996 welfare law that created the qualified-immigrant categories was amended in 1997 to add a specific guarantee: any qualified immigrant who receives SSI is eligible for Medicaid. Congress added that provision to soften the 1996 law’s effect on elderly and disabled immigrants, and H.R. 1 did not repeal it. The plaintiffs argued that an agency guidance document cannot override a statute that is still on the books, and that CMS was reading H.R. 1 to do something Congress had not done.
The lead plaintiff is Neighborhood House, a Seattle nonprofit that serves low-income and immigrant families, joined by one of its clients, Mariia Matsai, an SSI recipient who relies on Medicaid for daily living assistance. They are represented by Northwest Health Law Advocates and the firm Barnard Iglitzin and Lavitt. The suit, Neighborhood House v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, was filed in August and names HHS and Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
What the Judge Ordered
Zilly found the plaintiffs likely to win on the statutory argument and found the harm immediate. Without Medicaid-funded daily living assistance, he wrote, Matsai faced a reasonably foreseeable risk of declining health, potentially leading to permanent disability or death. The injunction stays in effect pending further order of the court.
Three limits. It is preliminary: a final ruling comes later, and the government can appeal to the Ninth Circuit. It is geographic: the order names Washington state, not the country, so an identical SSI recipient in Idaho lost Medicaid on October 1. And it is narrow: it protects people who receive SSI, not people who lost Medicaid for other reasons. Washington’s Health Care Authority confirmed the order covers more than 800 people and projected about 11,000 others would lose Apple Health on schedule.
The legal theory is not Washington-specific. The 1997 provision applies everywhere, CMS’s April guidance applies everywhere, and the same mismatch exists in every state that followed the guidance. A lawsuit by SSI recipients in another state, or a class action, could extend the result.
What This Means for Immigrants on SSI
In Washington: if you receive SSI and had Apple Health, your coverage continues. The Health Care Authority has instructions on its H.R. 1 page and asks enrollees to report any change in immigration status. If you received a termination notice before the order, contact the agency; the order requires funding to continue.
Outside Washington: the cutoff stands for now. If you receive SSI and your state ended your Medicaid on October 1, contact a legal aid organization or your state’s protection and advocacy agency for people with disabilities. In the meantime, ask your state Medicaid agency whether it is continuing coverage for SSI recipients on its own, since the 1997 law binds states as well as HHS, and some may read it the way Judge Zilly did without waiting for a lawsuit.
For everyone who lost Medicaid October 1 and is not on SSI, nothing changes. The remaining options are the ones that existed before: emergency Medicaid, community health centers, and the marketplace for the months until subsidies end in January.
The ruling matters most as a precedent. It is a court finding that H.R. 1’s implementation went beyond what Congress wrote, and it was won by a neighborhood nonprofit and a single disabled client. The federal government has 60 days to appeal; if it does not, or if the Ninth Circuit agrees, the 800 become the template for a much larger group.