Maribel Hastings
Posted October 9, 2025
With its well-oiled and well-funded deportation machine, the administration appears to have little concern for the government shutdown caused by a budget impasse, which is disrupting services for millions of Americans and furloughing thousands of federal employees.
Although the fiscal year 2026 budget remains in limbo, the misnamed Big Beautiful Bill Act secures $170 billion for the government to maintain its detention and deportation infrastructure.
The deadlock stems from Democrats’ push to remove the onerous provisions of the Big Beautiful Bill from the budget, which would leave millions without Medicaid, increase the cost of health insurance premiums for millions more Americans, and eliminate food assistance for millions of others. Republicans and the White House support the cuts.
Yet that hasn’t stopped Republicans led by Trump from using immigrants as scapegoats by falsely claiming that the government shutdown is due to Democrats wanting the 2026 budget to grant health insurance to undocumented immigrants. This is even though unauthorized individuals are not eligible for Obamacare or any other federal health program.
Trump even shared an offensive AI-generated video perpetuating the falsehood that Democrats want to give health insurance to undocumented immigrants because they need new voters, another false narrative.
Because this is solely about stirring up his base, and in the name of its extremist immigration agenda, the administration cares little about the consequences.
Moreover, his agenda of indiscriminate detentions and deportations, which is underway across the country, badly hurts immigrant workers, their American families, and the industries that have lost employees in agriculture, construction, hospitality, restaurants, and services such as childcare, elder care, and medical care, among many other jobs.
Between March and July of this year alone, 155,000 agricultural workers were lost, representing a 6.5% reduction in the workforce during the peak harvest season. This drives up the price of food, directly affecting consumers.
The shortage of construction workers, another sector affected by deportations, leads to delays and cancellations of projects, which in turn affects the cost of housing for everyone.
Trump has even diverted some 25,000 agents and employees from various federal agencies, such as the FBI, ATF, DEA, IRS, and others, from their regular duties to perform immigration tasks, neglecting areas such as drug trafficking, terrorism, tax evasion, fraud, and child exploitation. This affects our national security and that of our communities.
Reuters news agency analyzed nearly two million federal court records and found that “the number of people charged with breaking federal drug laws dropped to the lowest level in decades this year after the Trump administration ordered enforcement agencies to focus on deporting immigrants.”
Although Republicans proposed a temporary measure to keep the government running until November 21st, Democrats did not support it because it did not include any of their budget demands aimed at amending the excesses of the Big Beautiful Bill. Among those demands was reversing the onerous cuts to Medicaid, which will leave 11.8 million people without coverage over the next decade.
Democrats also oppose the multibillion-dollar cuts, $186 billion through 2035, to the nutritional assistance program known as SNAP.
They are also demanding the extension of subsidies that allow low- and middle-income people to purchase health insurance through Obamacare.
All of these cuts finance the tax reductions for billionaires included in the BBB.
Undocumented immigrants are at the forefront of this administration’s deportation agenda and continue to be its preferred scapegoat.
Maribel Hastings is a Senior Advisor to América’s Voice.
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