15 States Have Sued to Stop Biden From Helping People in the Us Illegally Get Health Insurance
TOPEKA, Kan. — Fifteen states sued the Biden administration in federal court on Thursday over a rule that will let 100,000 immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children sign up for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act next year.
The states want to stop the rule from going into force on November 1 and give tax breaks to people called “Dreamers” who sign up for health insurance. The platform for the Affordable Care Act opens for sign-ups on the same day, just four days before the election.
North Dakota was one of the states that filed the suit. All of them have Republican attorneys general who are part of a GOP effort to stop rules made by the Biden administration that help Democrats achieve their policy goals.
The case says the rule goes against the ACA and a law from 1996 that changed welfare. They also said it would make more people want to come to the U.S. illegally, which would put a lot of stress on the states and their public school systems. A lot of experts think that immigrants are good for the economy overall. For example, immigration seems to have helped create jobs after the COVID-19 pandemic, which kept the economy from going into a recession.
The lawsuit comes after Republicans said that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who is expected to be the Democratic presidential candidate, were not strong enough to stop illegal immigration. It was a record number of people crossing the border when Biden was president, but it has been going down since then.
“People who are here illegally shouldn’t be able to get in for free,” Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach said in a statement. “When they get there, they shouldn’t get any help from taxpayers, and the Biden-Harris administration shouldn’t be able to break the law without any consequences.”
Kobach is an immigration hardliner who became well-known across the country in the 1990s by calling for tight rules on immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. In 2010, he helped write Arizona’s “show your papers” law. Alabama, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Virginia are also part of the case. Kentucky and North Dakota are not.
Thursday, an email sent to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services asking for comment on the case was not answered right away. But when he laid out the rule in May, Biden said that he was “committed to giving Dreamers the support they need to succeed.” They won’t be deported because of the Biden government.
It is said that the “Dreamers” are young people who came to the U.S. with little or no choice and are now fully blended into their communities after years. The National Immigration Law Center says that at least 25 states, such as Kansas, Nebraska, and Virginia, let them pay the lower tuition rates that are only available to locals.
Biden said in May, “I’m proud of what Dreamers have done for our country.”
The “Dreamers” have not been able to get health insurance through government-funded programs because they did not have a “lawful presence” in the U.S. The states that sued said that announcing their legal presence by rule is “illogical on its face,” since they would be deported without help from the Biden administration.
It said that the ACA’s subsidized health insurance is a useful public benefit that encourages people who are in the United States illegally to stay.
Some states have had trouble convincing judges that the harm they are going to get from a new rule is direct, concrete, and detailed enough to give them the right to sue the Biden administration in the past. In this case, 15 states are involved. Only Idaho and Virginia don’t use a federal health insurance marketplace. Instead, they have their own.
However the states say that more illegal immigrants make their costs go up for everyone. A report from 2023 from the Federation for American Immigration Reform is what they use. It calls for stricter rules against illegal immigration as well as stricter limits on legal immigration.