American taxpayers have spent nearly $1.3 billion on medical and mental healthcare for illegal aliens through the last four fiscal years, and the annual cost of the treatment has jumped from about $190 million in 2016 to more than $300 million in 2020.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s massive expenditure demonstrates not just what a tax burden these illegal aliens will be when and if a President Biden declares a universal amnesty as he has promised. It also shows just how dangerous illegals are to the health of Americans.
Despite the Chinese Virus, they still cross the border either on foot or packed like sardines in automobiles. They also carry other potentially fatal and contagious diseases.
Last year, agents with Customs and Border Protection apprehended just under half a million illegals, a significant number of whom required medical care.
Big Numbers
In fiscal 2020, ICE reported, its Health Service Corps spent $315.1 million to care for illegals. ICEHSC treated 99,670 illegals at a cost of $25.59 per person per day.
Among the frightening numbers are these:
- 3,048 emergency room visits
- 15,571 dental visits
- 19,637 urgent care visits
- 123,936 sick calls
- 69,985 mental health visits
- 270,222 prescriptions
- 52,278 physicals
The massive waste of tax dollars this year increased 27 percent from last year’s $248.1 million. Though the annual cost decreased slightly from 2017 through 2019, expenditures are significantly more than in 2016.
Since then, when taxpayers coughed up $190.2 million to provide free medical care, the cost has risen 65.6 percent. The daily cost per person has increased 68 percent from $15.22 per person per day.
ICE operates 20 medical facilities.
How Sick Are They?
The report doesn’t detail the diseases, conditions, and mental problems the illegals had, but it’s safe to say a significant number suffered from more than the common cold.
In June, Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies reported that Chinese Virus cases had spiked along the border largely because of illegal immigration, not because state and local authorities had lifted “lockdown” orders.
“Evidence continues to mount that spikes in Covid cases in U.S. border states are due to successive waves of infected people fleeing Mexico’s dysfunctional and overwhelmed hospitals to get American medical care at least as much, if not more than, to the re-opening of those states’ economies,” Bensman wrote. “This matters because officials in border states are beginning to base policy decisions for partial lock-downs on grounds that lifting them is what caused the spikes.”
Illegals know how to game the system. They know border agents must take them to the hospital if they arrive sick. And border agents, too, were catching the Asiatic pathogen, Bensman reported.
And that isn’t the only danger to agents and American citizens.
Even under the Trump administration, immigration authorities have released hundreds of thousands of illegals into American communities, as The New American reported in 2019.
Aaron Hull, chief of the El Paso Border Sector, said illegals want agents to catch them because the illegals, at least at that time, knew an asylum plea meant immediate release. Then they could disappear.
“They’re not trying to get away,” he told Maria Bartiromo of Fox News. “They know that we’re basically — a period of time, they are going to be held in custody and then they’re going to be released and continue on to all parts of the United States.”
How many illegals with undetected, asymptomatic, or not-yet-symptomatic diseases were released is unknown.
But before the Chinese Virus, border agents worried they might contract Ebola Virus Disease from the illegal Africans who cross the borders.
Jon Anfinsen, a National Border Patrol Council vice president, told the Washington Examiner last year that illegals are routinely ill with scabies, mumps, and chickenpox.
Scabies is a skin infection caused by the human itch mite, which burrows into the outer layer of a person’s skin and lays eggs.
Chagas disease is another of gifts the illegals bring.
Diseases “spread like wildfires when you get into a cramped holding cell,” he said.
“We have a lot of agents who are sick,” he told the newspaper. “The other day I talked to agents from four different stations. And every single one of them had a cough.”
Said Anfinsen:
I’ll go and I’ll help process. There was one day I spent processing and we had like 40 Guatemalans and Hondurans, and most of them had some kind of cough. And sure enough the next day, I’m sick — for a week.
“It’ll go in waves,” a border agent told the Examiner. “Strep throat was the last one.… It was everywhere. Active tuberculosis comes in fairly regularly. We had an incident of H1N1, swine flu, in Clint [Texas] with a juvenile. And then the ones that are most disruptive are the simple ones: regular flu or lice.”
Last year, border agents collared 458,088 illegals.
