A federal judge in North Dakota blocked a Biden administration rule that allowed Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients to apply for ObamaCare coverage through the Affordable Care Act.
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, who led the lawsuit against the Biden administration, called the judge’s ruling on Monday “not surprising,” in an interview with Fox News Digital.
“In this case, it was argued before the election, and we definitely got the impression at the hearing that the judge was going to rule the way he did,” Kobach told Fox News Digital. “And similarly, there are a bunch of other cases where Republican states brought challenges to Biden administration policies, where again, the Biden administration was just torturing the English language and changing the meaning of statutes.”
“And so what the Biden administration attempted to do was to say, ‘Well, we will just define these categories of illegal aliens as lawfully present, even though they’re not,'” Kobach said. “It’s Alice in Wonderland stuff.”
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In the preliminary injunction issued Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Dan Traynor – appointed by President Trump during his first term – sided with 19 state attorneys general who filed a lawsuit against Biden’s rule in August. The state attorneys general argued it violates a law that bars ObamaCare benefits to illegal immigrants. Biden’s regulation will now not be enforced in those states.
“The Court concludes, through a common-sense inference, that the powerful incentive of health care will encourage aliens who may otherwise vacate the Plaintiff States to remain,” Traynor wrote.
The Biden administration’s executive action aimed to redefine illegal aliens as lawfully present. The states opposing the ruling were Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.
If Biden’s ruling remained in place, it would have resulted in over 100,000 uninsured illegal immigrants accessing health insurance. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) rule would have also allowed DACA recipients to apply for coverage through HealthCare.gov and state-based marketplaces. The rule would have done so by making what HHS calls “technical modifications” to the definition of “lawfully present” used to determine eligibility.
President Obama announced the DACA program on June 15, 2012, as an executive action to address the situation of young illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. The program was not passed through Congress but was implemented via a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) memorandum.
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Trump’s first-term administration tried to end DACA, but the Supreme Court blocked it in 2020.
“The impact on federal taxpayers, if this Biden regulation had gone through, would have been immense, because the benefit of getting the ObamaCare subsidy in any given year might be $4,000 or so,” Kobach said. “But if you multiply that times the hundreds of dreamers who would have gotten this benefit, and they would have gotten year after year… that would have included basically any illegal alien who’s got work authorization, and they number in the thousands. So the total impact, the total financial impact on taxpayers would certainly have been in the millions, possibly in the hundreds of millions.”
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid services (CMS) said in statement to media it is reviewing a lawsuit but does not comment on ongoing litigation.
Fox News Digital’s Adam Shaw contributed to this report.
