Xavier Becerra breaks the news, files suit against Trump administration public-charge rule.

More than 22 million people are illegally present in the United States, according to a recent study by scholars at MIT and Yale. Pew Research pegged the figure at 11 million, and for years it stood as the official count for media and government. It now emerges that 11 million is more like the number illegally present in California alone.

“California is home to over 10 million immigrants,” reads a chart displayed by California attorney general Xavier Becerra and governor Gavin Newsom as they announced a lawsuit against the Trump administration’s public-charge rule. “Immigrants,” is California code for “illegals,” a term the state’s ruling class has banned. As Rachel Bovard notes at American Greatness, even a legal immigrant’s ability “to stay off the welfare system must be taken into account when considering qualifications for a green card.”

California heaps welfare benefits on those illegally present, including nearly $100 million for health care in the recent budget. Many of those 10 million illegals came to California specifically to get those taxpayer-funded benefits. It disturbs Becerra and Newsom that this disqualifies the recipients from any future legal status, but there’s more to it. As attorney Madison Gesiotto explains in The Hill, voting must also be taken into account.

“Voting as an illegal alien in federal elections is a crime punishable by fine, imprisonment, deportation, or inadmissibility.” According to a State Department investigation, false-documented illegals have been voting in federal, state and local elections for decades. In 1996, illegals cast 784 votes against Republican Robert Dornan in a congressional race Democrat Loretta Sanchez won by only 984 votes.

If Newsom and Becerra are certain that more than 10 million people illegally reside in the state, they doubtless know how many voted in 2016. Trouble is, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla refused to release any voter information to a federal voter-fraud probe.

Back in 2015, Padilla told the Los Angeles Times, “At the latest, for the 2018 election cycle, I expect millions of new voters on the rolls in the state of California,” with “new voters” code for ineligible voters. True to form, by March, 2018, more than one million “undocumented” immigrants received driver’s licenses from the state Department of Motor Vehicles, which automatically registered them to vote under the “Motor Voter” program.

Padilla is now claiming that only six “California residents” were erroneously added to voter rolls for 2018, that it was all due to DMV errors, and that none was guilty of “fraudulently voting or attempting to vote.” To paraphrase John Goodman in The Big Lebowski, this is what happens when the governor’s own department of finance, not the official state auditor, investigates the DMV.

In reality, California officials know full well how many non-citizens voted in 2016 and 2018. With more than 10 million illegals in the state, the ballpark figure of one million illegal voters is probably low. In California, illegals are the Democrats’ electoral college, and the Democrats reward them with welfare benefits and protection from deportation through sanctuary laws. This raises another issue.

Illegals’ use of welfare benefits and practice of voting in federal elections disqualifies them from legal residency and citizenship. This makes for a permanent group of more than 10 million foreign nationals in California alone. In these conditions, Congress should start pushing back.

Public officials who apportion taxpayer-funded benefits for foreign nationals should be required to register as agents of the governments of those foreign nationals. The primary candidates would be the governments of Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, which Gavin Newsom visited before he had even toured his own state.

State and federal governments should also bill the foreign governments for welfare, medical, education and incarceration costs. Some of this could be alleviated by a tax on remissions, such as the 33.4 billion Mexicans abroad sent back last year. That amount is impossible without massive inputs from U.S. taxpayers. Legitimate citizens and legal immigrants have no obligation to relieve foreign governments of responsibility for their own citizens.

Meanwhile, as Rachel Bovard also notes, the Trump administration’s new rule only updates a 1996 law proclaiming “inadmissible” those aliens likely to become a public charge. The law was supported by Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden and other leading Democrats. The Trump administration measure gives more definition to what constitutes a welfare benefit, food stamps, Medicaid, public housing assistance and such. Those benefits are all for legitimate citizens and legal immigrants but Bovard cites Census data showing that 63 percent of non-citizens use the welfare system.

Those who thought there were only 11 million illegals nationwide were mistaken. Thanks to Jerry Brown crony Gavin Newsom, and Xavier Becerra, once on Hillary Clinton’s short list as a running mate, Americans now understand that “more than 10 million” illegally reside in California alone, and that might understate the figure.

The MIT-Yale estimate ranges as high as 29.1 million nationwide, more than the population of Australia, with 25,088,636 and a veritable occupation. To all but the willfully blind, politicians have abandoned the rule of law, and made false-documented illegals a protected, privileged class.

This is how a nation loses its sovereignty.