JD Vance Says Medicaid Cuts for Millions “Immaterial” Compared to Funding ICE

Vice President J.D. Vance has callously called the GOP’s massive cuts to Medicaid and other anti-poverty programs “immaterial,” saying the maintenance of such programs is trivial compared to boosting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the rogue immigration agency ravaging communities across the U.S.

In a series of social media posts on Tuesday, Vance downplayed the impact of the cuts that will yank away health insurance for an estimated 17 million Americans, the bulk of them poor and already struggling to survive.

Instead, he said, the most important part of the bill is the huge increase in funding to ICE, representing the single largest increase in immigration enforcement funding in U.S. history, per the American Immigration Council.

The Trump administration has put its barbaric anti-immigrant agenda at the center of Donald Trump’s second term, and is seeking to hire an additional 10,000 ICE employees as a result of the bill, increasing the agency’s staffing by 50 percent. These policies are not only cruel, but also widely unpopular across the U.S.

The cuts to Medicaid and other vital programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) are estimated to lead to 51,000 preventable deaths each year, if not more under the current version of the bill. Rural hospitals will see some of the worst impacts, with over 330 hospitals slated to be hurt by the bill and at risk of shuttering altogether, researchers have said.

Vance handwaved these impacts away as “minutiae.”

In his social media post, Vance repeated the lie that illegal immigration is “bankrupt[ing]” the country, claiming that this is what makes passing the bill so important. “Everything else — the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy — is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions,” he said on Monday.

Vance cast the tie-breaking vote to pass the bill in the Senate on Tuesday, with the Senate split 50-50 with three Republicans voting “no” — Senators Susan Collins (Maine), Rand Paul (Kentucky) and Thom Tillis (North Carolina).

The vice president criticized those saying that the GOP is seeking to bankrupt Medicaid, saying, instead, that people who oppose the cuts are the ones who want to bankrupt Medicaid.

“This guy wants to bankrupt Medicaid by importing millions of illegal immigrants and giving them healthcare that ought by right go to his fellow citizens,” he wrote of a pundit who criticized Vance’s “immaterial” comment.

However, Vance never acknowledged the simple fact that it’s possible to fund ICE without cutting Medicaid — with the cuts to Medicaid and other health care programs like the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) totaling over $1 trillion over the course of the bill. This is on top of the fact that the increases in funding to ICE will only go further toward Trump’s lawless immigration and community raids.