The House passed the Deporting Fraudsters Act on Wednesday by a vote of 231-186, with 186 Democrats opposing a bill that would make welfare fraud an explicitly deportable offense for illegal immigrants. The measure would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to define fraud as grounds for removal from the country.
The math is simple. The principle is simpler. If you are in this country illegally and you steal from taxpayers, you should be deported. Nearly every House Democrat disagreed.
The legislation, sponsored by Rep. David Taylor of Ohio, targets illegal immigrants who defraud public benefits programs. Taylor framed it in terms that shouldn't require a floor debate at all:
It's a no-brainer — if an illegal alien defrauds the United States or steals benefits from our nation's most vulnerable, they should be permanently removed from our country.
According to Fox News, Rep. Tom McClintock of California put the stakes in even plainer terms on the House floor Wednesday:
If you admit to or you're convicted of fraudulently receiving public benefits, you are out of here on the next plane and can never return.
That's the whole bill. Commit fraud, get deported, don't come back. The fact that this wasn't already black-letter law tells you something about how long Washington has tolerated the intolerable.
This legislation didn't materialize from nowhere. The House Oversight Committee launched a probe in December into massive welfare fraud involving Minnesota's social services programs. Federal prosecutors say as much as $9 billion in taxpayer money may have been stolen and have charged nearly 100 individuals.
Nine billion dollars. Not million. Billion.
Rep. Claudia Tenney of New York, speaking Tuesday at a House GOP leadership news conference, pointed to the investigative work that brought some of these schemes to light:
Independent journalist Nick Shirley helped expose a massive fraud scheme, showing how organized and widespread these scams can become even when oversight fails.
Shirley has probed alleged daycare fraud in Minnesota and California, pulling back the curtain on operations that flourished while government agencies looked the other way. That a single independent journalist did more to expose billions in fraud than the bureaucracies charged with preventing it is its own indictment of the system.
Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland offered the most revealing opposition on the floor:
Another week, another redundant and completely unnecessary immigration crime bill.
Redundant. Unnecessary. Nine billion dollars may have been stolen from programs meant to serve the most vulnerable Americans, federal prosecutors have charged nearly 100 people, and Raskin's complaint is that Congress is being repetitive.
But Raskin's second argument was even more instructive. He claimed the bill would actually help fraudsters escape justice:
By bypassing the conviction requirement, this legislation would hand a liberal get-out-of-jail free card to immigrants who commit fraud by deporting them without going through the criminal justice system and giving their victims a day in court.
So the Democratic position is now that deporting illegal immigrants who commit fraud is too lenient. That removing someone from the country permanently is a "get-out-of-jail free card." This is the rhetorical contortion you're forced into when you refuse to acknowledge the basic principle that people who are here illegally and commit fraud have forfeited any claim to remain.
Notice the framing: Raskin isn't arguing that these people should stay. He's arguing they should stay longer, to face trial, and then presumably remain in the country afterward if the case doesn't result in conviction. The concern isn't accountability. It's finding any procedural hook to prevent removal.
The bill faces steep odds in the Senate, where most legislation must overcome a 60-vote threshold to advance to a vote on final passage. Given the near-unanimous Democratic opposition in the House, the math in the upper chamber looks grim.
But the vote itself accomplished something important. It put 186 names on the record. Every one of those House Democrats now owns a vote against deporting people who steal from welfare programs. That's not a procedural abstraction. That's a position, stated clearly, in an election cycle where Americans are watching their grocery bills climb and their government hand billions to fraudsters.
There is a consistent thread running through Democratic opposition to immigration enforcement bills: no measure is ever the right one. If a bill targets violent criminals, it's too broad. If it targets fraud, it's redundant. If it streamlines deportation, it bypasses due process. If it requires conviction first, the backlog is too long to be practical. Every door leads to the same room: inaction.
Meanwhile, organized fraud networks operate at industrial scale, draining programs that exist for Americans who genuinely need them. Every dollar stolen from a benefits program is a dollar unavailable to a disabled veteran, an elderly widow, or a child in poverty. The victims of welfare fraud aren't abstractions. They're the people Democrats claim to champion.
One hundred eighty-six Democrats looked at a $9 billion fraud scandal, looked at a bill to deport the illegal immigrants responsible, and voted no.
The voters will remember, even if Washington won't.