U.S. President Joe Biden announced Thursday that hundreds of thousands of migrants who were brought to the United States without legal authorization when they were minors, better known as dreamers, will now be able to count on Medicaid and Affordable Care Act benefits.
This measure will allow beneficiaries of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), approved by then-President Barack Obama in 2012, to have access to government-funded health insurance.
“They are Americans in every way except on paper,” Biden said in a video posted on his Twitter page. “We need to give ′dreamers′ the opportunities and support they deserve.”
The initiative is likely to generate considerable pushback from conservative state governors who have been reluctant to expand Medicaid and critical of the Biden administration’s response to the irregular influx of immigrants into the United States. While the federal government provides funding and guidelines for Medicaid, the program is administered by the states.
Dreamers’ limbo
The DACA program was intended to protect from deportation undocumented migrants who were taken by their parents as children and allow them to work legally in the country.
However, they were ineligible for government-subsidized health insurance programs because they did not meet the requirement of having a “lawful presence” in the United States. That’s what Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services will try to change at the end of the month.
The White House action comes at a time when DACA faces legal challenges and the number of beneficiaries is shrinking.
An estimated 580,000 people were still enrolled in the program at the end of last year, according to Citizenship and Immigration Services, down from previous years.
Court orders currently prevent the Department of Homeland Security from processing new applications. The program has been mired in legal challenges for years, while Congress has been unable to reach a consensus to pass broader immigration reforms.
DACA recipients can work legally and pay taxes, but they have no legal status and are denied many of the benefits available to U.S. citizens and foreign nationals living in the country.
In recent years, during the coronavirus pandemic, millions of people signed up for Medicaid, the program that provides health coverage to the poorest Americans. The government increased federal subsidies to reduce the cost of commercial health plans under the Public Health Care Act. Last year, only 8% of Americans were uninsured, according to the Department of Health and Human Resources.
But neither DACA recipients nor those in the country without proper documentation can join these federally funded programs. Nearly half of the approximately 20 million immigrants in this situation do not have health insurance, according to research by the Kaiser Family Foundation.