Peter ,
After passing the House, the Senate is now debating a budget bill that threatens to exclude millions of immigrants here lawfully from essential support programs they currently qualify for, including Medicare, and expand funding for Trump’s mass deportation machine.
This legislation newly denies access to the Child Tax Credit (CTC) to over 4.5 million citizen or legal permanent resident children if one parent does not have a Social Security number, undermining one of our most potent tools to fight child poverty.1 At a time when families are still recovering from the economic fallout of the pandemic, cutting off this support is unconscionable. Denying the CTC to children simply because of one parent’s immigration status is not only cruel, it’s shortsighted. One in four children in the U.S. has an immigrant parent.2 These children are our future, and they deserve the same opportunities to thrive.
There is still time for Congress to reject the House-passed budget package and reject these harmful provisions, but it’s going to take all of us moving quickly.
Send a direct message to the Senate and tell them to stop the attacks on immigrant communities and reject the House-passed budget reconciliation package.
SEND A MESSAGEWhile undocumented immigrants are ineligible for federal public benefits, some lawful immigrants—such as trafficking and domestic violence victims, asylum applicants, refugees, and people granted temporary protected status—are eligible for a few federal benefit programs.
Medicare is available to lawful immigrants as long as they have paid into the system for at least 10 years.3 Still, the current reconciliation bill makes them ineligible to receive benefits, even though many have been paying in for decades, thereby breaking the promise this nation made to them.
The reconciliation bill also increases funding for mass deportations and immigration detention, funneling $150 billion into ICE and border militarization and $110 billion to the Department of Justice while shortchanging life-affirming programs like Medicaid and SNAP nutrition benefits by more than $1 trillion. This is a moral failure. Public dollars should support families, health care, education, and nutrition rather than fueling fear and family separation.
This inhumane bill also keeps unaccompanied migrant children from reuniting with family members in the U.S. by for the first time requiring payments of thousands of dollars from those families, and drastically increases fees from other migrants, including desperate people seeking asylum.
The Senate is aiming to pass a reconciliation bill by July 4th, giving us only a few weeks to urge them to reject any provisions that attack immigrant families and communities.
Join us in sending messages directly to the Senate to tell them to stop attacks on immigrant communities.
Thank you for all you do,
Deborah Weinstein
Executive Director, CHN Action
1 Millions of Citizen Children Would be Harmed by Proposal Billed as Targeting Immigrant Tax Filers
2 Children of Immigrants: Key Facts on Health Coverage and Care
3 The House Reconciliation Bill Threatens Working Families and Our Democracy
