While legacy media fact checkers have scrambled to dismantle the GOP argument that Democrats shut down the government over subsidized healthcare for illegals, experts and the federal government make clear that Republicans have a point.
Major news outlets are framing GOP accusations that Democrats are shutting down the government to give illegal migrants subsidized healthcare as false, arguing that only lawfully present foreign nationals are able to obtain such benefits. However, a large number of foreign nationals — such those paroled into the country — are both eligible for subsidized care and considered to be illegally present by the federal government and experts.
“We see these fact checkers come out saying ‘false, false, false’ everywhere, but there’s no formal definition of illegal alien anywhere, right?” Jason Richwine, a resident scholar for the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), said to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “So it’s a perfectly defensible opinion — and it’s an opinion that I share — that people with these sort of limited protections from deportation, like Temporary Protected Status, DACA, humanitarian parole, that they are still illegal aliens.”
“That’s my opinion, and it also happens to be the way those illegals are counted,” Richwine continued. “When groups like, not just the Center for Immigration Studies, but the Department of Homeland Security and Pew [Research Center] and the Migration Policy Institute, when they do their official counts of how many illegal immigrants there are, [they include] people with those statuses as illegal, and so it’s perfectly reasonable for Republicans to do that too.”
‘Semantic Debate’
“This is false,” deemed an Associated Press fact check of the claim that “Democrats shut down the government because they want to give free health care to immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally.”
While acknowledging that hospitals receive some Medicaid reimbursements for emergency care that can go toward undocumented migrants, the AP definitively claimed that “immigrants in the U.S. illegally are not eligible for any federal health care programs, including insurance provided through the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid.”
On the question of “can ‘illegal immigrants’ get federally funded health care?” a USA Today article also answered no. “Democrats want to restore Medicaid and marketplace access to where they were at the start of the summer, to a time when millions more Americans, and some lawful immigrants, could qualify,” USA Today states.
NPR and CNN also issued fact checks, with both outlets declaring it false to claim that Democrats are pushing to give healthcare benefits to illegal migrants.
Both the AP and USA Today fact checks mention that “lawfully present” immigrants are capable of accessing Medicaid and Obamacare exchanges — access that would be restored in the Democrats’ plan. However, both articles fail to mention that there are categories of foreign nationals that are eligible for federal healthcare subsidies and still considered to be unlawfully present by the federal government.
Foreign nationals paroled into the U.S. are considered to be unauthorized immigrants by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Beneficiaries of Protected Status (TPS) are also considered to be illegal under DHS. Both categories are also considered to be among the unauthorized population by the non-partisan Pew Research Center.
Parolees could access Medicaid after a five-year waiting period and could additionally qualify for Obamacare subsidies after one year, according to CIS, which adds that TPS holders are capable of accessing Obamacare subsidies. The Congressional Research Service (CRS), a non-partisan research institution, also identifies parolees as eligible for federal healthcare benefits under certain conditions.
“The entire thing is a semantic debate, regrettably,” Art Arthur, a resident fellow at CIS, said to the DCNF. “If you were paroled into the United States for more than a year then you are on a pathway to becoming a qualified non-citizen [for purposes] of those critical means tested public benefits.”
“By no stretch of the imagination is a person who is paroled into the United States a person most people would consider to be here legally,” Arthur continued.
The illegal migrant population in the U.S. exploded under President Joe Biden — including the number of illegal migrants who can become eligible for federally subsidized healthcare. During his four years in office, the former president allowed 2.9 million inadmissible foreign nationals into the U.S. under parole and his administration skyrocketed the number of illegal migrants with TPS from 400,000 to 1.2 million, according to Richwine.
‘Righting The Fiscal Ship’
The shutdown fight centers around Obamacare premium subsidies that were put into place during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The American Rescue Plan in March 2021 extended premium subsidy eligibility to people at any income level and the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022 extended these extensions through December 2025.
Under the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) signed into law by President Donald Trump, subsidized care for migrant parolees, TPS holders and other foreign nationals would sunset at the end of 2025. Democrats are demanding that these subsidies be extended in order to earn their votes to end the shutdown.
The Democratic-backed budget proposal would not only keep the COVID-era extensions in place, but also restore eligibility for these foreign nationals. For this reason, immigration experts argue it’s fair game for Republicans to accuse Democrats of wanting to give subsidized healthcare to illegal migrants.
Billions in taxpayer funds are spent every year by state and local governments on illegal migrants, according to 2023 study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a Washington, D.C.-based organization that advocates for lower levels of illegal immigration. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that Medicaid-funded emergency services to illegal migrants cost more than $16.2 billion in just the first three years of the Biden administration, marking a 124% increase compared to the same time period in Trump’s first term.
“The legislators who are refusing to spend any more taxpayer money on medical care for foreign law breakers should be applauded,” Matt O’Brien, deputy executive director of FAIR, stated to the DCNF. “However, this is just a first step in righting the fiscal ship as it pertains to illegal aliens.”
“The first duty of any government is to protect its citizens, but certain factions within the U.S. government seem bent on bankrupting America in order to protect the health of foreigners with the very thinnest of connections to this country,” O’Brien said.
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