The Actual Facts on Taxpayer-Funded Healthcare For Illegal Immigrants

WASHINGTON, DC - NOVEMBER 6: Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), center, speaks alongside April Verrett, president of the Service Employees International Union, left, and Representative Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA), right, during a news conference with Congressional Democrats outside of the U.S. Capitol on November 6, 2025 in Washington, DC. The news conference focused on the lasting effects of the government shutdown on health care costs and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits. (Photo by Eric Lee/Getty Images)

Overview

Vice President JD Vance claims that the “far left faction of Senate Democrats shut down the government because we wouldn’t give them hundreds of billions of dollars for health care benefits for illegal aliens.” President Trump takes this a step further by alleging that Democrats “want to spend $1.5 trillion on illegal immigrants and destroy health care for everyone else.”

On the other side of the aisle, Senate Democrat Leader Chuck Schumer claims that under their bill to open the government, “not a single federal dollar goes to providing health insurance for undocumented immigrants.” Likewise, the Democratic National Committee blames the shutdown on Republicans’ refusal to “negotiate about Americans’ health care.”

Contrary to Democrats and certain “fact checkers,” Senate Democrats are demanding significant amounts of taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal immigrants in exchange for opening the government for merely one month.

Contrary to Republicans, healthcare for illegal immigrants, even under the broadest definition of that term, accounts for less than 13% of the Democrat bill that would enact their demands.

Contrary to the figures quoted by nearly everyone, the Democrat bill would cost multiples of what is commonly reported. This is because it creates permanent welfare benefits, but politicians and journalists are only citing the cost estimates for the next 10 years.
 

Background

The federal government is now partially shut down because Democrats and Republicans are at an impasse.

House Republicans passed a funding measure that largely maintains the status quo for two months so that the parties have time to negotiate, but Senate Democrats effectively filibustered it. This stalled the bill in the Senate, even though it received 55 out of 100 votes, including all but one of the Republicans, two Democrats, and one Independent.

Senate Democrats wrote and voted for a competing bill that would open the government for just one month in exchange for:

• entrenching a temporary Covid-era handout that increased Obamacare subsidies.
• repealing “health care provisions that were included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, including provisions that reduced Medicaid funding.”

The Democrat bill would cost taxpayers about $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years. This is the standard timeframe that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) uses to estimate the costs of mandatory spending bills. Such laws permanently enact spending which continues every year into the future unless congress and the president pass new laws to change the status quo.

To pass either bill will require 60 votes due to Senate rules. A majority could also employ the nuclear option to do away with the filibuster, but that would destroy a long-standing principle that requires senators to reach a level of consensus before passing certain bills.
 

“Lawfully Present”

One of the keys to understanding how Democrats funnel welfare to illegal immigrants is explained in a 2015 federal appeals court ruling that struck down President Obama’s attempt to unilaterally place four-to-five million illegal immigrants above the law. The ruling states:

• The “Attorney General,” who is under the authority of the President, has certain powers to deem unauthorized immigrants as “lawfully present in the United States.”
• Although a “grant of lawful presence” is “not an enforceable right to remain in the United States and can be revoked at any time,” it “removes” a prohibition against receiving “federal public benefits” and “thereby makes otherwise ineligible persons eligible to qualify” for them.

In short, a “grant of lawful presence” can allow illegal aliens to receive welfare, but it doesn’t transform them into legal immigrants.
 

“Legal Fiction”

Likewise, a 2022 federal appeals court ruling explains that grants of “parole” — which President Biden gave to millions of inadmissible aliens — don’t confer “legal status”:

But when an alien is granted parole, immigration authorities temporarily allow the alien access to the country while his or her application for admission is pending, though the alien is explicitly not considered “admitted” while in this condition. …

Put another way, parole creates something of legal fiction; although a paroled alien is physically allowed to enter the country, the legal status of the alien is the same as if he or she were still being held at the border waiting for his or her application for admission to be granted or denied.

In other words, such aliens are not legal immigrants and are only allowed into the U.S. under a “legal fiction” that pretends they aren’t really in the country.
 

“Fact Checkers”

With broad disregard for the facts of this matter, so-called fact checkers have repeatedly conflated grants of lawful presence or parole with legal status. For example:

• CNN’s chief fact checker, Tom Foreman, argues that Democrats aren’t trying to give Obamacare to illegal immigrants because “the law itself says” that the “only people who could get” it are “lawfully present in the United States.”
• Daniel Dale, another CNN fact checker, admits that “Democrats are trying to reverse” provisions of the Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) that “took away some combination of Obamacare subsidies and Medicare eligibility from various immigrant groups,” but “it’s important to emphasize that these immigrants with parole” have “permission to be in the U.S.”
• PolitiFact’s Maria Ramirez Uribe claims that “Democrats want to restore access to certain health care programs to legal immigrants who will lose access under the Republican tax and spending law.”
• Leonardo Cuello, a research professor and PhD legal scholar at Georgetown University, alleges that repealing the BBB won’t “increase or reinstate” healthcare benefits for “undocumented immigrants” but for “lawfully present immigrants.”

All of those statements fail to reveal that the aliens in question aren’t legal immigrants but the beneficiaries of executive decisions that grant them a temporary reprieve from deportation.
 

Illegal Bulk Paroles

Furthermore, the vast bulk of parolees, particularly under Biden, were let into the U.S. by distorting a federal law that allows for temporary entries of inadmissible aliens “only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.” “Case-by-case” doesn’t mean letting them in by the millions, which is what Biden did.

Twenty states filed a lawsuit against Biden’s bulk parole of inadmissible aliens, but the case was dismissed by a federal judge on the basis of standing, a legal doctrine that prohibits lawsuits unless plaintiffs can prove that they suffered a direct personal injury. The litigation continued but wasn’t resolved before Biden left office.

Even if the courts had ultimately sided with Biden on the issue of standing, this wouldn’t make his actions legal. Biden used the same argument when he tried to illegally transfer student loan debts to taxpayers. This was struck down by the Supreme Court in a 6–3 ruling, but the minority of justices sided with Biden’s claim that the plaintiffs didn’t have “standing” to challenge his actions.
 

DREAMERS

Another revealing example of how Democrats give welfare to illegal immigrants involves DACA recipients, commonly called DREAMERS. This group of 800,000 people was deemed “lawfully present” by a mere memo from Obama’s Attorney General in 2012. Ten years later, Biden formalized the memo with a regulation while admitting that “DACA is not a form of lawful status but DACA recipients are considered ‘lawfully present’ for certain purposes.”

At the outset of DACA, Obama unilaterally decided to make them eligible for Medicare and Social Security but not Obamacare. Thus, numerous politicians, media outlets, and “fact checkers” insisted that these illegal immigrants couldn’t receive Obamacare. That was until Biden unilaterally decided to make them eligible.

Trump has since rescinded Biden’s edict, and the BBB explicitly bans future presidents from doing what Biden did, but the Democrat bill would repeal this section of the law. Yet, Democrats deny that they want to give healthcare to illegal immigrants, and “fact checkers” are helping them spread this falsehood.
 

The Actual Amounts

A Trump White House report titled the “Democrat Plan to Fund Healthcare for Illegal Immigrants” alleges that about $195 billion of Democrats’ demands for reopening the government consist of taxpayer-funded healthcare benefits for “illegal immigrants and non-citizens over the next decade.”

Importantly, the term “non-citizens” is broader than “illegal immigrants,” which is how Republicans are misleadingly framing the issue.

In detail, the Democrat bill would repeal “Subtitle B of title VII” of the BBB. This part of the bill contains the following provisions that limit healthcare handouts to aliens. Unless Democrats rescind them, CBO estimates that over the next 10 years they will save taxpayers about:

• $91.4 billion by preventing illegal immigrants and other non-citizens like temporary workers from receiving Obamacare benefits. (Section 71301 of the BBB.)
• $34.6 billion by preventing states like California from using a tax kickback scheme to obtain more federal money for Medicaid, which is fungible and can be used to fund comprehensive Medicaid coverage for illegal immigrants, as California does for 1.7 million aliens. (Section 71117 of the BBB.)
• $28.2 billion by ending an Obamacare provision that gives extra federal money to states like California for emergency room services and childbirths for illegal immigrants. (Section 71110 of the BBB.)
• $27.3 billion by preventing illegal immigrants and other non-citizens from receiving special Obamacare benefits given to poor people who are typically ineligible for Medicaid due to their immigration status. (Section 71302 of the BBB.)
• $6.2 billion by preventing illegal immigrants and other non-citizens like refugees from receiving comprehensive Medicaid. (Section 71109 of the BBB.)
• $5.1 billion by preventing illegal immigrants and other non-citizens from receiving Medicare benefits for elderly people. (Section 71201 of the BBB.)

In total, these figures amount to $193 billion that the Democrat bill would give to illegal immigrants and other non-citizens over the next 10 years. This is 13% of the $1.5 trillion that Democrats are demanding in exchange for keeping the government open for just one month.

All of the figures above are far beneath the full costs of the Democrat bill because they involve changes to mandatory programs. This means the spending will continue endlessly into the future unless congress and the president pass new laws to repeal these provisions.

James D. Agresti is the president of Just Facts, a research and educational institute dedicated to publishing facts about public policies and teaching research skills.