WASHINGTON—Yesterday, Kansas and fourteen other states went to court to stop the Biden administration from expanding Obamacare coverage to recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The suit, filed in North Dakota federal district court, claims that the administration’s rule expanding the coverage is contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious. The Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) is outside counsel in this case, providing assistance to the attorneys at the Kansas Attorney General’s office.
It is against federal law to provide public benefits, such as public health insurance, to aliens not lawfully present in the country. To get around this, the administration redefined DACA recipients as “lawfully present.”
But the executive branch cannot change the law by an act of will, the suit points out. Congress makes the laws, and under the immigration laws Congress has passed, DACA recipients are not lawfully present in the United States.
Indeed, the problem goes even deeper. The DACA program itself is based on the unlawful presence of its beneficiaries. If they were lawfully present, there would be no need to defer action on their unlawful presence. In other words, in its act of redefinition, the administration proclaims that those aliens on whose unlawful presence it is deferring action actually do not have unlawful presence, but are lawfully present. That is a self-contradictory statement, meaning it cannot possibly be true, and a policy depending on it is necessarily arbitrary and capricious.
“This expansion of Obamacare to illegal aliens once again shows the Biden Administration’s contempt for the law,” said Dale L. Wilcox, executive director and general counsel of IRLI. “Like DACA itself, this expansion is a usurpation of power by an executive that opposes the will of the people as expressed in duly-enacted laws, and arrogantly purports to rewrite the law itself. We are proud to be assisting Kansas and the other states in this effort, and hope the court sees how starkly unlawful Biden’s new rule is, and strikes it down.”
The case is Kansas v. United States, No. 1:24-cv-00150 (D.N.D.).
