House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said on Thursday that “everyone” in the country must receive health benefits during the coronavirus pandemic, regardless of citizenship or legal status.
“It’s in everyone’s interest that everyone be in the health-care loop. … it’s absolutely essential that we’re able to get benefits to everyone in our country when we’re testing, when we’re tracing, when we’re treating and the rest,” Pelosi said during her weekly press teleconference call, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Pelosi’s comment comes as Congress debates the next phase of the stimulus package, and specifically concerns payments of up to $2,400 for married couples who jointly file their taxes, and $500 for child dependents. These payments were authorized in legislation that Congress passed in March, but that provision excluded people who have an individual taxpayer identification number that undocumented immigrants who don’t have a Social Security number use when paying taxes. This meant that families that contain a taxpaying undocumented immigrant do not receive these payments, even if all the rest of the family are citizens or otherwise legally living in the United States.
“We have been working to get the tax identification number as a basis for how people would get direct payments,” Pelosi said. “I myself cannot understand why the tax number is not the basis for how some of this money is distributed, so we’ll be making that case.”
She noted that California has joined with nonprofits to establish a fund to help undocumented immigrants.
“We are well-served if we recognize that everybody in our country is part of our community and … helping to grow the economy. Most of what we are doing is to meet the needs of people, but it’s all stimulus, so we shouldn’t cut the stimulus off,” the House Speaker said.
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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