Good morning, all! Every Friday, I answer reader questions in a Q&A column for paid subscribers.
This morning, I’m going deep on just one question, which several readers sent in: are Republicans being truthful when they claim that the Democratic government funding proposal would provide health care to immigrants here illegally?
I wanted to give this question the time and research it deserved, to hopefully give you a full picture of the facts. You all sent in a lot of other great shutdown questions — my plan is to answer them in another special Q&A column next week!
With that, let’s dive in…
One of the most prominent claims of the government shutdown so far has been the Trump administration’s insistence that Democrats are shutting down the government over a demand to subsidize health care for unauthorized immigrants.
President Trump, Vice President Vance, and congressional Republicans have repeated this over and over again. “FACT: Democrats Shut Down Government Over Free Healthcare for Illegals,” reads a headline on the White House website. The claim was also the fuel for Trump’s now-infamous video of Hakeem Jeffries in a sombrero.
“Republicans have settled on their message for the government shutdown: A noun, a verb, and ‘illegal aliens,’” Semafor’s Dave Weigel wrote yesterday, paraphrasing a younger Joe Biden.
The key part of the proposed Democratic continuing resolution that animates these claims is here, on page 56:
This provision repeals the entire subtitle of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) dealing with health care. That means it would undo, most prominently, the new Medicaid work requirements that were passed as part of the law. But there are also other OBBBA provisions that would be swept away, which are at issue here.
Specifically, Republicans point to four parts of the OBBBA that Democrats are trying to repeal that they say support their claim that the Democratic funding bill tries to protect government-funded health care for unauthorized immigrants. I’ll lay out each one for you here: all of the parts of the OBBBA referenced below are provisions that would be repealed by the Democratic proposal. You can be the judge of whether any or all of them rise to the bar of substantiating the Republican claim.
1. Full Medicaid. Before the OBBBA, anyone who was “permanently residing in the United States under the color of law” was eligible for full Medicaid benefits.
This included a large group of immigrants, including people with refugee or asylum status, people who had been paroled into the U.S. for at least one year, and people who had been granted withholding of removal.
Section 71109 of the OBBBA (found on page 227) changed it so, starting in October 2026, full Medicaid benefits should only be made available to:
U.S. citizens
U.S. nationals (this mainly refers to people in the U.S. territories like the American Samoa or the Northern Mariana Islands who opt to become U.S. nationals instead of citizens)
Lawful permanent residents (someone who has been granted the right to live here permanently, better known as a “green card holder”)
Cuban or Haitian aliens who are given a special immigration status
People from the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, and Palau who live here legally and are subject to a treaty with these tiny Pacific Island states
If the Democratic funding bill were approved, refugees, asylees, and others who don’t fall into these categories — but did previously qualify for Medicaid — would once again be eligible.
None of these people, to be clear, entered the U.S. without any lawful authority whatsoever. However, Republicans have long accused the Biden administration of abusing the refugee and asylum statuses to let in more immigrants than would otherwise have been accepted into the country.
So, it all depends how you are defining “illegal aliens.” Typically, refugees and asylees are not considered to fall under this category, because they entered the U.S. with permission; Republicans, however, have often referred to some Biden-era admissions as “illegal,” to make the point that some of these immigrants likely wouldn’t have been let in under previous administrations’ policies and to charge that Biden used these lawful statuses as a guise to bring in more immigrants.