Last Year’s Reconciliation Law Is Even More Extreme Than the 1996 Law That Took Away Benefits From People With Lawful Immigration Status

People who are immigrants play a vital role in our communities, and we should ensure that they have access to the essential supports they need to thrive. Thirty years ago, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) took away access to public benefits from many people with a lawful immigration status. Republicans deepened that harm in last year’s reconciliation law, ending a long-standing bipartisan commitment to preserving access to benefits for people granted humanitarian protections under U.S. immigration law. Taking away food assistance and health care from this group of vulnerable people will deny them the often-temporary help they need to meet their basic needs and rebuild their lives.

PRWORA created the harsh “qualified” immigrant standard, restricting access for most federal public benefits programs to a limited subset of immigration categories that excludes many people with lawful immigration statuses. Moreover, PRWORA created a five-year waiting period, or “five-year bar,” before many people with “qualified” immigration statuses can qualify for a number of federal basic needs programs, including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the food assistance program now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Supplemental Security Income, and Medicaid.

These restrictions have left many people unable to access health care, food assistance, and income assistance. That led to widespread harm in the years immediately following enactment and more families in deep poverty.

After PRWORA’s passage, the percentage of immigrant-headed households receiving public benefits declined substantially: the number of immigrant children and immigrant parents receiving Medicaid fell by 7 to 8 percentage points between 1995 and 2000, and SNAP participation by immigrants dropped by as much as 55 percent in some states.

These programs provide resources that ensure that children can continue to have their basic needs met, adults can get or stay healthy so they can continue to support their kids and work, and our communities can prosper.

Without health coverage people are vulnerable to medical debt, are more likely to delay or avoid care altogether, and experience worse health outcomes. Without SNAP and Medicaid eligibility, children have poorer life trajectories including worse health and educational outcomes. These restrictions not only harm people and families but our nation as a whole.

But in PRWORA, Congress preserved eligibility for certain people granted humanitarian-related immigration status out of concern for their (and their families’) well-being and safety. This group includes:

• Refugees, who are fleeing persecution and have been vetted and adjudicated as needing protection before they come to the United States;
• People who have been granted asylum after proving, while in the United States, that they would face persecution in their home country; and
• Certain victims of sex or labor trafficking, who help law enforcement bring the perpetrators to justice, as well as certain victims of domestic violence.

In a departure from this long-standing bipartisan principle, the harmful 2025 Republican reconciliation law takes away access to public benefit programs for these humanitarian immigrants. This is a fundamental shift in how the U.S. treats people it has chosen to protect.

The law took away food assistance through SNAP, as well as health coverage through Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Medicare, and Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credits that help people pay for health plans, while funding tax cuts for the wealthy and fueling the Trump Administration’s violent and costly detention and deportation machine.

Once the harmful reconciliation law’s immigration-related restrictions take full effect, enrollment for SNAP, Medicaid, Medicare, CHIP, and ACA tax credits will be generally limited to people with the following statuses:

• Citizens and nationals of the United States;
• Lawful permanent residents (LPRs, also known as green card holders, many of whom are subject to the 5-year bar for Medicaid, CHIP, and SNAP);
• Cuban-Haitian entrants, who meet specific criteria as defined in the Refugee Education Assistance Act of 1980; and
• People from the Federated States of Micronesia, Republic of the Marshall Islands, or Republic of Palau who live and work in the United States under Compacts of Free Association (COFA), often referred to as COFA migrants.

Moreover, the Trump Administration has made the process to obtain LPR status (one of the few statuses in the new narrow group above) increasingly challenging. And for months, it has put an outright hold on immigration applications from certain countries, even as applications that are being processed already take months to years to be adjudicated. And the 2025 reconciliation law significantly increased the fees for many immigration applications, including asylum and certain applications to adjust to LPR status, placing those pathways even further out of reach. These and other efforts aimed at slowing or even halting pathways to lawful immigration status have resulted in plummeting approval rates and growing applicant backlogs.

The Administration is also seeking to further restrict or obstruct access to public benefits, tax credits, and other important services more broadly. For example, it is trying to build on PRWORA’s harsh immigration eligibility restrictions by attempting to impose the PRWORA “qualified” immigrant standard on programs like housing assistance, Head Start, and refundable tax credits. It is also deterring people from accessing benefits to which they may be entitled through its efforts to share private information collected by benefit agencies with the Department of Homeland Security to support the Administration’s violent detention and deportation agenda.

And recently, the Administration finalized a new public charge regulation and issued new guidance that will give immigration officers enormous discretion to derail people seeking to become LPRs if they have used a far broader set of public benefit programs than have ever been considered before. This rule will sow fear and create a chilling effect for families that include immigrants. In a recent report, KFF estimates that “Between 1.4 million to 4.1 million people could disenroll from Medicaid or CHIP, including about 560,000 to about 1.7 million citizen children,” as a result of this and the Administration’s other anti-immigrant policies.

Turning our backs on people seeking safety and opportunity in our country is not only a betrayal of our humanitarian commitments, but it also undermines our communities and the economy as a whole. Immigrants strengthen economic growth, contribute to safer and healthier communities, and have a positive impact on the nation’s budget. Policymakers should reverse these restrictions.