White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was cornered in her press briefing on Friday as she tried to argue the administration was trying to prevent undocumented immigrants from burdening U.S. hospitals as part of the shutdown standoff.
The press secretary was asked if the Trump administration’s position is that hospitals should not have to treat undocumented immigrants who show up in emergency rooms.
Leavitt denied that was their stance before beating a hasty retreat.
“No, that’s not our position,“ she said. ”Our position is that it is unacceptable that the Biden administration paroled and encouraged an invasion of tens of millions of illegal aliens into our country and then promised them free health care.“
Leavitt then went on to repeat accusations that Democrats want to give undocumented immigrants free health care and quickly left the briefing room.
The talking point that Democrats want to provide health care benefits to undocumented immigrants has been central to the administration’s messaging in the government shutdown, which is now on its third day.
They’ve claimed that it is at the heart of Democrats’ demands in the shutdown, but Democrats have rejected it as a lie.
Democrats are calling for the short-term spending bill to address the expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies, which will cause health care costs to spike for Americans at the end of the year.
They also want to roll back some of the Medicaid cuts in the Trump tax law passed in July.
Republicans claimed when the law passed that it was removing undocumented immigrants from Medicaid, but the legislation only related to certain eligible immigrants who are in the country legally and American citizens.
Undocumented immigrants are already barred from federal health care programs by law, and reversing cuts would not change that.
Earlier in the briefing, Leavitt ranted about how undocumented immigrants were burdening hospitals as part of her messaging against Democrats in the shutdown, only to later admit the administration was not changing its stance, indicating her claims were irrelevant to the situation at hand.
Discussions over hospitals treating undocumented immigrants in hospital emergency rooms were never addressed in the president’s “Big, Beautiful” bill when it passed.
When the bill was crafted, there was a push to prevent states from using their own funds for health coverage for undocumented immigrants by restricting federal Medicaid money to states that did, but this provision never made it into the final law.
While repealing provisions of the law would expand the share of federal funding to hospitals, it would not change eligibility for undocumented immigrants, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-partisan organization focused on health care policy.
But Leavitt dug in with her irrelevant claims on Friday and argued even the suggestion of providing health care to undocumented immigrants encourages a “mass illegal invasion.”
“We have seen the unfortunate consequence of that where American patients are being put last, where American patients are having to wait in wait rooms, where grandmothers and grandfathers are waiting hours and hours for care because they are being put behind the line to illegal aliens, and we don’t agree with that,“ she said.
She then pivoted instead to arguing that the administration wanted to continue its work of deporting those who were in the country illegally by ending the shutdown. She then exited the briefing room in dramatic fashion.
While she said it was not the administration’s position that hospital emergency rooms deny treating undocumented immigrants, the law requiring it was passed under President Ronald Reagan.
The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) requires hospitals to stabilize anyone who shows up in an emergency.
Nothing about emergency rooms was addressed in the GOP tax law.
