Alien Welfare Cheats Cut Off
It's truly stunning how lawless the Biden administration was, and how much it all cost. Here's another great example.
One way to reduce welfare benefits is to cut off people who obviously should not be getting them. In addition to the bureaucrats who feed off the system, people illegally in the country certainly should not be subsidized with taxpayer money. President Trump is setting out to stop that.
Last Wednesday, Trump directed all federal agencies to stop giving public benefits to people who are residing in the United States illegally. Trump is using existing federal laws to justify his directive, such as the 1996 welfare reform law, The Center Square reports:
The order cites federal law, including the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, that “generally prohibits illegal aliens from obtaining most taxpayer-funded benefits.”
Title IV of the law states that it’s national policy that “aliens within the Nation's borders not depend on public resources to meet their needs,” and that “[i]t is a compelling government interest to remove the incentive for illegal immigration provided by the availability of public benefits.”
As the original law intended, Trump’s order holds that state and local governments must follow the rules or lose their funding:
All federal agency heads were directed to identify all federally funded programs their respective agencies administer “that currently permit illegal aliens to obtain any cash or non-cash public benefit” and take appropriate actions to align such programs with the order’s directive and the PRWORA.
They are also directed to ensure that federal payments to states and localities “do not, by design or effect, facilitate the subsidization or promotion of illegal immigration, or abet so-called ‘sanctuary’ policies that seek to shield illegal aliens from deportation;” and “enhance eligibility verification systems, to the maximum extent possible, to ensure that taxpayer-funded benefits exclude any ineligible alien who entered the United States illegally or is otherwise unlawfully present in the United States.”
If this policy seems to you to be hardhearted toward people in the country illegally, note that federal immigration law requires prospective immigrants to show that they are self-supporting before they may be legally admitted into the United States:
In 2021, Texas and 13 states sued to ensure that a federal public charge rule remained in effect, which requires foreign nationals to prove they can financially support themselves prior to being admitted to the U.S., The Center Square reported.
The Biden administration “repeatedly undercut the goals of [the 1996] law,” Trump stated in his executive order. By flouting the law in that way, Biden treated criminal aliens far more leniently than law-abiding ones, lavishly rewarding people for breaking our laws.
Trump’s directive should save a shocking amount of money that the federal, state, and local governments should not have been spending over the years. The Center Square story reports:
One estimate put the cost of taxpayer-funded benefits for illegal foreign nationals at roughly $120 billion a year before the Biden administration border crisis, The Center Square reported. By 2023, a U.S. House report estimated that housing and shelter, public school education, health care and several welfare programs cost taxpayers more than $451 billion.
That’s in addition to another report estimating that every year, $42 billion is spent on one or more welfare programs for illegal foreign nationals and $69 million on public school education for illegal foreign national children; and a Medicare report found that “emergency services for undocumented aliens” cost $7 billion in fiscal 2021 and $5.4 billion in fiscal 2022, with taxpayer money funding at least $8 billion in improper Medicaid payouts (10% of the nation's total of $80 billion), The Center Square reported.
Total costs of benefits for illegal foreign nationals is expected to be in the trillions going back decades.
None of that spending was legal.