Trump insists on a hoax about migrants to explain the government shutdown

For the first time in nearly seven years, the U.S. government is partially shut down. Democrats and Republicans blame each other for reaching a situation that is tragic for many families who depend on public funds and for those who will lose their jobs. Meanwhile, accusations and lies have swirled around the main stumbling block in the fruitless bipartisan negotiations: the funding of health care programs. And once again, as has been the case since Donald Trump returned to the White House, the Republican administration is focusing on undocumented immigrants as the reason for the disagreement.

The administration accuses Democrats of imposing health care for immigrants without legal residency as a condition for reaching an agreement. But Democrats deny this and point out that the insurmountable obstacle is the elimination of health insurance subsidies, approved during the pandemic and now expiring, which would leave millions of American citizens without assistance.

“We’ll probably have a shutdown because one of the things they want to do is they want to give incredible Medicare, Cadillac, the Cadillac Medicare, to illegal immigrants,” Trump said Tuesday, hours before the deadline for reaching an agreement. “They want to have illegal aliens come into our country and get massive health care at the cost to everybody else.”

In the past two days, other members of his administration have echoed his claims. “Democrats are holding the American government HOSTAGE so they can give FREE health care to ILLEGAL ALIENS,” House Speaker Mike Johnson wrote on social media Wednesday. And Vice President J.D. Vance accused Democrats of wanting to “take from the American people in order to give taxpayer-funded healthcare to illegal immigrants.”

However, Democrats have not called for medical assistance for undocumented migrants, who are not eligible for federal programs. It’s “a flat-out lie,” said Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer.

“It’s a compelling argument that Democrats want to provide health care to undocumented immigrants, but it’s simply not true in terms of the cuts they’re trying to reverse,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president of health policy at KFF, a research organization dedicated to health issues.

Rights taken away

Democrats can’t possibly want to restore federal health coverage to undocumented immigrants because they never had it in the first place. By law, residents who are in the country illegally cannot access federal benefits, including healthcare.

The accusation, repeated by Republicans, is based on the fact that Democrats support restoring the right to health care to migrants who are legally residing in the country and who have been left out from Medicaid, the federal program for low-income earners, by the president’s tax reform, the so-called “big, beautiful bill.” These are refugees and asylum seekers, beneficiaries of programs like humanitarian parole, who have temporary permission to be in the United States, but whom Trump’s law has left without access to doctors. Despite their legal status, the president considers them to be undocumented.

According to a KFF analysis, approximately 1.4 million migrants could lose health insurance coverage under Trump’s new law, passed by Congress this summer.

But that’s not why Democrats have refused to budge. “Federal law prohibits the use of taxpayer dollars to provide medical coverage to undocumented individuals. And there is nothing in anything that we have proposed that is trying to change that law,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries declared on Tuesday, responding to the accusation. “We are fighting for the health care of the American people.”

Obamacare at stake

Jeffries is referring to the elimination of tax subsidies that make health insurance premiums cheaper in the marketplaces established by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as Obamacare. The subsidies expire at the end of the year, and if they’re not extended, millions of people will see their premiums skyrocket.

“People will see their premiums double, in many cases by hundreds or thousands of dollars. That’s the ongoing debate, and it has nothing to do with immigrants. It impacts anyone who buys coverage individually,” says Anthony Wright, executive director of Families USA, a health rights advocacy organization. “What they’re trying to hide is that costs are rising for everyone, that millions of Americans will lose their coverage as a result of these significant premium increases.”

In a country where healthcare costs are exorbitant, Barack Obama created the ACA to lower them. Obamacare implemented a health insurance marketplace that offers coverage at lower prices to citizens who don’t have insurance through their jobs.

Some 22 million people benefit from it. These include restaurant and retail workers, small business owners and employees, barbers, hairdressers, Uber gig workers, ranchers, farmers, musicians and artists, real estate agents, dentists… These are workers who cannot access Medicaid because they are above the poverty line, but for whom the subsidies allow them to pay for their insurance, since the premiums do not exceed 8% of their salaries.

Wright explains that, without these benefits, that percentage could rise to 25% of their salaries. For example, for someone paying $400 a month, the premium could increase to $1,400 a month. Experts estimate that some four million people will be left without health insurance due to their inability to afford it.

Another cut proposed by the president’s tax reform, and opposed by Democrats, relates to the funding the government allocates to hospitals for emergency services. By law, hospitals must provide care for urgent cases, such as a heart attack, a car accident, or a gunshot wound, regardless of the patient’s immigration status. The law also contemplates cutting reimbursement to hospitals for these services.

Medicaid for Latinos

The law also includes the largest-ever cut to Medicaid, which will affect disadvantaged communities such as African Americans and Latinos. “Tens of millions of Americans, including millions of Latinos,” rely on Obamacare, Medicaid, and other government programs “to access affordable health care, feed their families and care for them. We applaud lawmakers fighting to address this crisis and the consequences that working families will face,” said Janet Murguía, president of UnidosUS, in a statement yesterday. More than 20 million Latinos rely on Medicaid, including half of all children in that community.

The government shutdown could extend until the next budget review, on November 21. The two parties’ positions on health care spending appear, for the moment, irreconcilable. And migrants continue to be the Administration’s recurring theme to explain it away, even if it isn’t true.

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