Officials say participants of DACA will be eligible to access government-funded health insurance programs.
President Joe Biden is set to announce that his administration is expanding eligibility for Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act's health insurance exchanges to hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children, according to two U.S. officials briefed on the matter.
The 2012 DACA initiative was meant to shield from deportation immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents as young children and to allow them to work legally in the country. However, the immigrants were still ineligible for government-subsidized health insurance programs because they did not meet the definition for having “lawful presence” in the U.S. That's what Biden's Department of Health and Human Services will aim to change by the end of the month.
An estimated 580,000 people were still enrolled in DACA at the end of last year, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. That number is down from previous years. Court orders currently prevent the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from processing new applications. The DACA program has been mired in legal challenges for years, while Congress has been unable to reach consensus on broader immigration reforms.
But DACA recipients, as well as those in the country without documentation, are barred from joining those federally funded programs. About half of the roughly 20 million immigrants who are living in the U.S. without documentation are uninsured, according to research from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
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