Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is applauding President Joe Biden’s move to open the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, to hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
On Thursday, Biden announced that DACA illegal aliens will soon be eligible to secure taxpayer-subsidized healthcare benefits through Obamacare and Medicaid. In 2009, then-President Obama promised that Obamacare would not be open to illegal aliens.
Mayorkas said DHS “is committed to doing everything in our power to preserve and fortify DACA,” calling on Congress to next work on an amnesty plan that gives green cards and, eventually, naturalized American citizenship to DACA illegal aliens.
“We support President Biden’s efforts to expand health coverage to DACA recipients,” Mayorkas said in a statement:
I am proud to have put the DACA program in place as Director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services in 2012. Over the past 11 years, DACA has provided over 800,000 young people with security in the only country many of them have ever known where they make significant contributions to their communities. We stand ready to work with Congress to provide permanent protection for DREAMers. [Emphasis added]
In February, Breitbart News reported that Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) reintroduced their “DREAM Act” legislation to give green cards to about two million illegal aliens enrolled and eligible for DACA.
As Breitbart News reported in 2017, a DACA amnesty would open a surge of chain migration — where newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the U.S. — ranging from 10 million to 19 million foreign nationals.
A prior Breitbart News analysis found that a DACA amnesty would cost American taxpayers some $115 billion by opening Obamacare rolls to newly legalized illegal aliens. Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has estimated that such an amnesty would cost taxpayers $26 billion.
That same CBO report suggested that about 1-in-5 DACA illegal aliens, after an amnesty, would end up on food stamps, while at least 1-in-7 would go on Medicaid.
To date, more than a million illegal aliens have been enrolled in DACA, at one time or another, which shields them from arrest and deportation by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. DACA was first implemented by the Obama administration in 2012 while Mayorkas headed the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter here.
