Yes, Illegal Aliens Receive Welfare

It’s time to be blunt.

Illegal aliens vote. And illegal aliens receive welfare.

There’s a good reason the Left and the media work so hard to deny and cover up these facts. To keep their political power, they’ve determined it is easier to cater to illegal aliens than to do what’s right for American citizens. Keeping illegal aliens receiving welfare and voting benefits the Left. As the stakes get bigger, so do their lies.

Let’s take that second fact, for example—that illegal aliens receive welfare. Every time welfare reform discussions include the point that welfare dollars are flowing to people who shouldn’t be eligible for these programs, someone on the Left always pipes up and says, “It’s already illegal for illegal aliens to get welfare, so this isn’t even happening.”

If you believe that, then we’ve got a bridge to sell to you.

Federal law does bar illegal aliens from most Medicaid, ObamaCare, and cash welfare benefits. But federal law is not the same thing as federal practice, and for more than a decade, Obama- and Biden-era loopholes turned that legal bar into Swiss cheese. Before the One, Big, Beautiful Bill, illegal aliens were receiving taxpayer-funded benefits through several channels, and states were pocketing extra federal money for doing it.

How illegal aliens get access to welfare

“Emergency” Medicaid, even without emergencies. States get federal reimbursement to provide emergency Medicaid coverage for illegal aliens. Although it was created as a narrow safety-net provision meant for life-threatening situations, spending on this program nearly tripled under President Biden, hitting $6.1 billion in 2024. California alone claimed more than $4.5 billion of that, nearly 75 percent of the entire national total, despite housing only 16 percent of the country’s illegal alien population. Worse still, under ObamaCare’s matching formula, states could claim a higher federal match for covering able-bodied illegal aliens’ emergency services than they received for covering the elderly and people with disabilities.

Parole and temporary status treated as “qualified.” Illegal aliens granted parole for a year or more are legally classified as “qualified aliens” for Medicaid purposes, even though parole grants no lawful status and is supposed to be issued only case by case. The Biden administration granted parole to nearly three million otherwise inadmissible aliens, spending as little as 15 to 30 minutes per case, and in many instances granting it without any application at all.

Reasonable opportunity periods that never end. Federal regulations stipulate that applicants who can’t immediately prove citizenship get a reasonable opportunity period of 90 days to produce documentation. Between 2019 and 2023, the number of Medicaid enrollees who were in a reasonable opportunity period rose 45 percent, while the number of enrollees who ultimately couldn’t prove their status spiked more than 400 percent. Some states kept these “temporary” windows open for more than 14 years.

Fraud through stolen identities and financing gimmicks. Illegal aliens have used stolen Social Security numbers to enroll in Medicaid, and most states don’t require proof of identity to apply. States like California and New York also ran “state-funded” Medicaid programs for illegal aliens that were, in reality, financed through federal infrastructure and inflated managed-care taxes: a laundering scheme that let California turn $7.6 billion a year in taxes on federal taxpayers into general-fund dollars for illegal aliens’ coverage.

Stolen identities on food stamps, too. FGA’s research on food stamp program integrity found thousands of enrollees using Social Security numbers that couldn’t be verified, including numbers issued before the applicant’s date of birth, a telltale sign of stolen or synthetic identities. A meaningful share of that identity fraud in food stamps traces back to illegal aliens using stolen IDs to get benefits they aren’t eligible for, and it’s compounded by the Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility loophole, which has let states wave through 5.9 million ineligible enrollees.

Taxpayer-funded housing, no questions asked. Federal law bars illegal aliens from HUD housing assistance and requires verification through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program. But a recent joint HUD-DHS investigation found nearly 6,000 confirmed ineligible tenants and another 200,000 tenants who had never been through eligibility verification at all, plus 25,000 deceased tenants still occupying taxpayer-funded units. HUD pulled this off through two invented workarounds: a “do not contend” provision letting tenants simply decline to confirm their citizenship status and keep receiving prorated assistance, and an age exemption fabricated under the Obama administration that waives verification entirely for anyone 62 or older, with no basis in federal law. Every one of those units is one an eligible low-income family spent years waiting for.

The TANF “child-only” loophole. This one isn’t limited to Medicaid. Federal law has barred illegal aliens from cash welfare for nearly 30 years, yet new FGA research found that households headed by an ineligible parent received nearly $760 million in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits in 2024 alone, and $18.3 billion since 2001. In most states, cash welfare may be paid to households based solely on the child’s eligibility. These “child-only” cases allow cash welfare to flow to households with illegal aliens and other ineligible non-citizens. Nearly 70 percent of this spending comes out of California, but the loophole touches nearly every state.

It’s not victimless

Every dollar that flows to someone who was never eligible is a dollar that doesn’t reach the people these programs were built for. With billions in improper food stamp payments, nearly $760 million in cash welfare flowing to households headed by ineligible parents in 2024 alone, and $6.1 billion in emergency Medicaid spending on illegal aliens that same year, there is a real cost to this issue. The cost is in the actual bill to cover all of these expenses, and in the inflation that inevitably follows.

A new working paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that the record surge in illegal immigration between 2021 and 2024 also strained the housing market, raising costs for American families already competing for a place to live.

The One, Big, Beautiful Bill is ending business as usual

Congress closed several of these doors through the One, Big, Beautiful Bill. The law:

• Ended the enhanced federal match rate for illegal aliens’ emergency Medicaid, tying it to the state’s normal rate instead
• Narrowed Medicaid and ObamaCare eligibility to citizens, lawful permanent residents, Cuban and Haitian refugees, and individuals lawfully present under the Compact of Free Association
• Paused the Biden-era rule barring states from capping reasonable opportunity periods
• Paused the Biden-era rule barring states from requiring identity verification
• Required states to check Social Security death records quarterly
• Required states to submit enrollees’ Social Security numbers monthly to catch duplicate and fraudulent enrollment
• Banned the managed-care tax schemes states used to launder federal dollars into “state-funded” programs
• Fined states with high eligibility error rates

These are the most significant welfare integrity reforms in a generation.

The loopholes that are still open

None of this means the problem is solved. Several of these fixes are pauses, not permanent law, and a future administration could simply reinstate the Biden-era rules they paused. States still aren’t required to verify identity at the point of application; the One, Big, Beautiful Bill only removed the federal rule blocking them from doing so. The reasonable opportunity period cap is back in states’ hands, but nothing forces a state run by illegal-alien-friendly officials to use it.

The “state-funded” Medicaid programs haven’t disappeared either. California has spent years building its own coverage for illegal aliens, and that state law doesn’t go away just because Congress cut off one financing gimmick. More than a dozen states still run these programs, and unwinding them now falls to state legislatures, not Congress.

And the One, Big, Beautiful Bill never touched the TANF child-only loophole at all. Because the child in these cases is a citizen and the only “recipient” of the grant on paper, the household sails past federal restrictions on aliens receiving welfare. As FGA’s research points out, Congress and state legislatures need to require that a parent’s immigration status and income count toward these cases, or the loophole keeps paying out on autopilot.

Bottom line

Don’t believe anyone who tells you that since it’s “illegal” to give illegal aliens welfare, that it’s not happening.

There’s a reason so many blue states are refusing to share their welfare data with the federal government—and it has nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with political power.

From Medicaid to food stamps to cash welfare to government housing, the Left has opened the doors to illegal aliens accessing welfare resources they had no business—or legal standing—to qualify for. It’s created a magnet for further illegal immigration and jeopardized the safety net for the truly needy who rely on it. The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are finally putting an end to these schemes.