President Trump signed his executive order, PRESERVING FEDERAL BENEFITS FOR AMERICAN CITIZENS, Wednesday night “to ensure taxpayer resources are not used to incentivize or support illegal immigration.”
Details of the EO are here.
Wednesday afternoon, Trump delivered remarks in front of a group of billionaires at the Faena Hotel during Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund’s FII PRIORITY Miami 2025 conference.
A White House official told Melugin that Trump’s executive order will direct federal agency and department heads to identify all federally funded programs that provide financial benefits to illegal aliens, and for them to “take corrective action.”
The measure is reportedly designed to ensure that any federal funds to states and localities “will not be used to support sanctuary policies or assist illegal immigration.”
While illegal aliens are not supposed to be eligible for welfare programs, the Biden-Harris regime abused loopholes to confer “status” to millions of non citizens as a part of their catch-and-release agenda, the Economic Policy Innovation Center pointed out in its December 2024 report.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), there were 10.8 million encounters with illegal aliens between fiscal years 2021 and 2024. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that the net immigration of illegal immigrants totaled 7.3 million between FY 2021 and 2024. In comparison, net migration of illegals was negative in the four years prior to this.
For the past four years, illegal aliens have been receiving welfare benefits from many different public assistance programs, including:
- Food Stamps (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, “SNAP”)
- Child nutrition programs
- Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)
- Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
- Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG)
- Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)
- Child Tax Credit (CTC)
- Obamacare Premium Tax Credit
- Obamacare cost sharing subsidies
- Medicare
- Medicaid
- Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP)
- Pell Grants
- Student loans
- Head Start
- Public housing
- Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund (SLFRF)
The cost of welfare programs for noncitizens is estimated to be in the billions.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) estimated that federal expenditures on illegal aliens in 2023 totaled nearly $66.5 billion, including more than $23 billion in federal medical expenditures and $11.6 billion in welfare benefits from Food Stamps, child nutrition, SSI, and other programs.
In its “Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration On United States Taxpayers 2023” report, FAIR estimated that the net cost of illegal immigration for the United States at the federal, state, and local levels at the start of 2023 was at least $150.7 billion.
The Manhattan Institute estimated that “every new illegal immigrant has an average net fiscal burden of about $130,000.”
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