It has happened again. August rolls around and a new, harsher set of immigration restrictions emerges from the White House. Two years ago, President Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller rolled out the points-based RAISE Act, which would reduce legal immigration by as much as 50 percent over a decade. Two days ago, the acting Citizenship and Immigration Services director, Ken Cuccinelli, unveiled an anti-immigrant statute that vastly expands the meaning of “public charge.”

Both Mr. Miller and Mr. Cuccinelli came face-to-face with a reporter quoting two lines from Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus”: “Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” In response, Mr. Miller blasted his questioner, CNN’s Jim Acosta, with the dire news that “there is no Statue of Liberty law of the land,” pointing out that the poem “was added later, is not actually a part of the original Statue of Liberty.” This week Mr. Cuccinelli, facing a similar question from NPR’s Rachel Martin, nimbly rewrote the poem: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge.”

That it neither rhymes nor scans is the least of our worries.

Like Mr. Miller, Mr. Cuccinelli offered a little history lesson. “That plaque was put on the Statue of Liberty at almost the same time as the first public-charge law was passed,” he said, and called the timing “very interesting.” Very interesting indeed, and very false.

As Mr. Miller correctly pointed out, a plaque bearing the poem was not mounted inside the pedestal of the statue until 1903, 16 years after Emma Lazarus died at age 37 of cancer. The Immigration Act of 1882, passed more than a year before Ms. Lazarus wrote the poem, was the first to designate categories of inadmissible aliens, among them “lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of him or herself without becoming a public charge.” This is the law Mr. Cuccinelli cites to hallow the term “public charge.” It was written broadly enough to be used to deport single women, pregnant women, and physically and mentally disabled immigrants, and it was.