The Biden administration is expected to announce its plan to expand eligibility for Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act's health insurance exchanges to hundreds of thousands of aliens brought to the U.S. as minors.
The announcement will allow participants in the Obama-era amnesty program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA, to access taxpayer-funded health insurance programs, according to two officials who spoke anonymously.
The 2012 DACA amnesty was designed to shield illegal aliens brought into the U.S. below a certain age from deportation and allow them to work legally in the country. However, The AP reports, "the immigrants were still ineligible for government-subsidized health insurance programs because they did not meet the definition for having "lawful presence" in the U.S."
The action from the Biden administration comes as DACA remains in legal peril and the number of aliens eligible for the deportation amnesty continues to shrink.
The AP reports:
An estimated 580,000 people were still enrolled in DACA at the end of last year, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. That number is down from previous years. Court orders currently prevent the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from processing new applications. The DACA program has been mired in legal challenges for years, while Congress has been unable to reach a consensus on broader immigration reforms.
While providing taxpayer-funded medical services to illegal aliens has garnered some bi-bartisan support in recent years, negotiations have often stalled over the impact such a decision would have on Biden's border crisis. Make no mistake, expanding such federal programs to illegal aliens will act an a magnet to induce others to try to enter the U.S. illegally.
You can read the complete story here.
