For weeks, the Trump administration has been claiming that undocumented immigrants — “illegals,” it says — have been getting free health care, and blaming the Biden administration for it. The President has said Democrats have shut down the government because they want to spend $1 trillion on health care for “illegals.”
Experts say this is false.
Vice President JD Vance has come under fire for claiming on Wednesday that wait times at emergency rooms have increased because “illegals” are getting free health care.
On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked if emergency rooms should be checking immigration status before accepting a dying patient.
After she declined to offer an opinion, deferring to legal and medical experts, the reporter asked, “do you think that illegal aliens should receive Medicaid benefits?”
She replied: “Medicaid benefits that go to the most vulnerable people in our country? Medicaid benefits that were designed to help low income families and Americans in our country?”
Leavitt claimed, falsely, that the Biden administration funneled millions of “illegal aliens” into a program called Protective Temporary Status (TPS) and granted them access to those “free benefits.”
The Biden administration “allowed tens of millions of illegal aliens from all over the world to come into our country, yes, and they paroled them into the system,” Leavitt claimed, calling it a “complete abuse of our immigration system. She added that “they slapped a Band-Aid on these illegals, they called it Temporary Protective Status [sic], and then they allowed those illegals, from all over the world, to get free benefits.”
But her claim is false, according to several expert sources: TPS beneficiaries are not entitled to Medicaid or other similar federal government benefits.
“Some immigrants,” KFF last month noted, “such as those with temporary protected status, are lawfully present but do not have a qualified status and are not eligible to enroll in Medicaid or CHIP regardless of their length of time in the country.”
“Beneficiaries are not eligible for any public assistance by virtue of their TPS status,” according to the American Immigration Council.