Greg Abbott calls for Biden-Harris admin to pay for illegal immigrants' health care in new executive order

Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order on Thursday requiring hospitals to report the annual costs of caring for illegal immigrants so the state can apply for reimbursement from the federal government.

The Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) aims to collect information about illegal immigrants who use state hospitals for emergency and inpatient care. seconds the executive order. Those costs will be reported each year to Abbott's office and the Texas Legislature so state officials can seek reimbursement from the Biden-Harris administration.

The Republican governor directly blames the White House's “reckless open border policies” for high health care costs.

“Due to the open border policies of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Texas has had to foot the bill for medical costs for people in the state illegally,” Abbott said in a press release. “Texans should not have to shoulder the burden of financially supporting medical care for illegal immigrants.”

“That's why today I issued an executive order requiring the Texas Health and Human Services Commission to collect and report the health care costs of illegal immigrants in our state,” the governor continued. “Texas will hold the Biden-Harris Administration accountable for the consequences of their open border policies, and we will fight to make sure they return their costly and dangerous policies to Texas.”

According to the order, hospitals must begin collecting information on the costs of medical care for illegal migrants by Nov. 1 and must report their data quarterly. Starting in 2026, hospitals would begin reporting their data annually to the governor, lieutenant governor and speaker of the Texas House.

However, patients will also be informed that, under federal law, any response to legal status will not affect patient care, according to the order.

Abbott's order follows an ongoing border crisis that has brought more than 7 million foreign nationals into the US illegally since the start of the Biden-Harris administration. seconds the latest data from Customs and Border Protection. Major cities in the country, such as Denver, Chicago and New York, do this annually shelled out millions attend to the many asylum seekers who descend on their jurisdictions.

Abbott, who leads a state that shares most of the US-Mexico border, has positioned himself as a leading figure in the GOP struggle against the border policies of the Biden-Harris administration with the launch of its own Operation Lodestar initiative and other judicial processes.

While it is difficult to determine the exact cost of providing emergency and other medical care to illegal migrants, given that many states do not require legal status, some estimates put the price in the billions. A Study 2023 The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) put total federal medical expenditures at more than $23 billion and estimated state medical expenditures at more than $18 billion.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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