Fresh from a scandal about her personal behavior in a Denver theater, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) has been taken down by The Washington Post's Fact-Checker for a claim about federal payments to unauthorized immigrants — which dates back to a hoax that's at least 17 years old and not even relevant to the United States.
“Biden is giving each illegal family $2,200 per month plus a free plane ticket and free medical care," said Boebert in a post on X with millions of views and thousands of reposts. "If you come to this country illegally, you get everything handed to you on a silver platter. If you’re a struggling American citizen, you get nothing. You actually just subsidize this foolishness.”
None of this is true, wrote Glenn Kessler. Under U.S. law, migrants who have a valid claim to have escaped from war or persecution receive a one-time payment to set up their new lives, and that's it. Undocumented immigrants aren't eligible. Indeed, if Boebert's claim were correct, then the roughly 2 million such immigrants released into the country since 2021 would have cost $53 billion a year — despite the entire Department of Homeland Security budget is $60 billion.
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As it turns out, wrote Kessler, variants of this false claim have been circling on the internet for years — and one of the earliest versions of it wasn't even a claim about the United States, but about migrant policy in Canada.
In 2018, wrote Kessler, "a Facebook meme ... made this false claim: 'Illegal refugees get $3,874/mo. under the Federal Assistance Program. Our SS checks are approximately $1,200/mo.' That meme in turn was based on a Facebook post that Snopes in 2017 debunked — a post that referred (falsely) to refugee policy in Canada."
And that post showed a 2016 resettlement payment for $3,874 that was actually a one-time payment for a family of five. In fact, Kessler noted, "In 2006, on a webpage called 'Just the Facts,' Canada’s immigration department was compelled to post a statement debunking the idea that refugees received more financial assistance on a monthly basis than pensioners."
