White House Finally Lets Dreamers Overpay for Obamacare
White House Finally Lets Dreamers Overpay for Obamacare
Joaquin Castro put in the work. Now everyone wants to take the credit.
President Joe Biden gave the migrant rights community a welcome Friday news dump when he authorized Dreamers — migrant youths who arrived as children through ‘no fault of their own’ — to purchase health insurance on the Obamacare exchanges beginning in November.
“Today, my Administration is expanding affordable, quality health care coverage to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients. Dreamers are our loved ones, our nurses, teachers, and small business owners. And they deserve the promise of health care just like all of us,” said Biden, in a statement.
Behind the scenes, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) has spent years leading the charge to grant DACA recipients access to the Affordable Care Act (ACA). He led more than 90 House members in 2021 calling on President Biden and then-acting Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Norris Cochran to grant access to ACA benefits for DACA recipients in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Then, in November 2022, Rep. Castro and Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.) also led members of the House and Senate urging HHS to rescind federal regulations that exclude DACA recipients from eligibility for health insurance subsidies and coverage. The letter also asked HHS to issue a State Health Officials letter clarifying DACA recipients’ eligibility for Medicaid and CHIP.
In November 2023, a letter signed by more than a dozen Senators and about 100 House members called on HHS to finalize their proposed rule to expand health coverage for those participating in the DACA program, crime victims, and immigrant children.
“Over the last twelve years, DACA has allowed hundreds of thousands of first-generation Americans to graduate from college, join the workforce, and chase their American dreams in the only country many of them have ever known,” said Castro. “Throughout that time, these young Americans have been asked to work and pay taxes to support a system of affordable health care that excluded them. Today’s announcement is an important step forward to right that wrong.
“The rapid spread and devastating toll of the COVID-19 pandemic was a reminder that our country is safer when everyone has access to the care they need. I’m proud to see the Biden administration heed the calls of public health advocates and immigrant communities and open the Affordable Care Act marketplace to DACA recipients, and I hope the administration will also move to similarly expand Medicaid and CHIP eligibility as soon as possible,” Castro continued.
Enter the Migrant Policy Peanut Gallery
Despite having little to do with earning Obamacare access, a chorus of org leaders and other administration pant sniffers offered pre-scripted statements of political alignment and moral adulation when the news broke that DACA-mented migrants would get a rare policy carrot from Biden.
NOTABLE. Capitol Press has learned throughout the day some of the most prominent figures in the long-broken “movement” for migrant- and Latino-civil rights were caught wholly unaware.
Now advocates and policy watchers await the ugly stick that, if history is precedent, is sure to follow the tiny carrot offered to impacted migrants by the Biden team.
In a move that all but validated advocates’ concerns, this week White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients promoted two migrant policy workers to his team in the West Wing in what seems to be preparation for a crackdown on migrants and asylum-seekers at the border. —
Marcela Escobari was brought in as a new senior adviser to help address migration to the U.S. She has been working as the Assistant Administrator of the Latin American and Caribbean Bureau at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and previously worked as a Senior Fellow in the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution
Blas Nuñez-Neto, formerly the Assistant Secretary for Border and Immigration Policy at DHS, was also called up to the West Wing where he is expected to work under deputy chief of staff Natalie Quillian. In effect, this makes Nuñez-Neto the most powerful migrant policy advisor in the White House, answerable to neither the Domestic Policy Council (DPC) nor the National Security Council (NSC).
Migrant rights insiders in Washington are unsure so far of what to make of Escobari, a Bolivian whose resume offers a mixed bag of largely unremarkable stints as an international development utility player on projects abroad and around the Beltway.
Latinas hired with broad mandates and big job titles have fared poorly in the West Wing under Biden, especially on the migrant policy portfolio. Andrea Flores was described as a ‘disillusioned young Biden official’ in an explosive The New Yorker article in January of 2022 in which Flores identified top Biden White House officials as bulwarks against rolling back some of former President Donald Trump’s harshest enforcement policies against immigrants.
Nuñez-Neto, on the other hand, is a familiar name to migrant rights insiders. A migrant himself from Argentina, Nuñez-Neto has been described as “a classic Uncle Tom” for his willingness to brown-wash the xenophobic policy inclinations of his powerful white colleagues, like national security advisor Jake Sullivan, chief-of-staff Jeff Zients, and disgraced ex domestic policy advisor Susan Rice.
What’s most interesting about Blas’ promotion to work on Zients team is just how utterly ineffective he’s been in his border-focused role at DHS since the beginning of Biden’s presidency. The U.S.-Mexico “border crisis” continues to be the ugliest political pie in the eye of Biden’s first term. Well, that’s on Nuñez-Neto who has objectively failed for three years straight as Biden’s top border advisor.
In closing, we’ll keep watching the migrant beat at the White House, especially on afternoons like this one when the House and Senate are away from Capitol Hill. While stories like this don’t cleanly pertain to the House and Senate, the otherwise strict focus of Capitol Press, we feel the coverage by other outlets of the inner workings of the migrant policy portfolio in the West Wing has been inadequate, to put it mildly.
Meanwhile, if you have a story to tell about Blas, Escobari, or any of the names dropped in this post, we’d love to hear from you! Email us at editor@capitol.press. Thanks for reading!