The vote has exposed deep divisions within the Democratic Party over the future of healthcare access.
Democrat members of the Latino Caucus—an immensely powerful force in California politics—once spoke with vim and vigor about the need to expand healthcare benefits for illegal immigrants. Once a mere pipe dream, the effort goes back to the early 2010’s when Caucus leaders first began pushing the policy as a priority. Innumerable impassioned speeches later, the dream finally became reality in 2024 when, for the first time, the Caucus got its wish.
Today, barely one year later, the very same Caucus members have quietly voted—by a ratio of 30 in favor; 5 against—to cut medical benefits for undocumented migrants from the state budget.
What happened? The short answer is government overspending and fiscal irresponsibility. In January of this year, Governor Gavin Newsom predicted that the state would enjoy a budget surplus for the fiscal year. Pundits jumped in to tout “no deficits” and “California has more money than expected,” along with a veritable laundry list of things the Governor would like to spend the extra funds on.
In reality, the state overspent by $12 billion—a massive deficit. The Governor’s Office posted its annual May Revision, which contains recommendations from Director of Finance Joe Stephenshaw, Deputy Director of External Affairs H.D. Palmer, and others on how to address the gap. Among them is “a freeze on new enrollment to full-scope coverage for individuals, regardless of immigration status, aged 19 and over, effective no sooner than January 1, 2026.”
In other words, the Governor who said only weeks prior that he would not consider ending healthcare benefits for the undocumented did just that.
For context, Gov. Newsom’s office believes the state has spent roughly $9.5 billion covering healthcare costs for illegal immigrants across the last fiscal year. That may even be a conservative estimate. Evidently, with the state’s budget deficit growing increasingly urgent, the Democrats’ priorities have shifted.
That hasn’t stopped the Latino Caucus and its members from engaging in political theatrics and waxing poetic about the need to make healthcare available to everyone while simultaneously voting to make healthcare not available for everyone.
“If we move forward with freezing Medi-Cal enrollment and charging premiums to our immigrant population, we are no better than the Trump administration,” said Assemblywoman Sade Elhawary, a Democrat from Los Angeles. “The federal administration targeted immigrant communities with force, and we are targeting them through this budget by basically cutting off their access to health care.”
Rather than voting against the cuts, however, Elhawary abstained from voting on the proposal altogether.
“The freeze to Medi-Cal for working aged immigrant communities in our state budget is a huge setback for Californians who are already struggling to make ends meet… They too, [sic] deserve to be treated with dignity by ensuring their health is prioritized, just like every other hard working Californian,” said Sen. Lena Gonzalez who chairs the Caucus.
Gonzalez said this after she, like Elhawary, abstained from voting rather than voting against the cuts.
Similarly, the Caucus put out a press release in May that it was working with “labor, health, and immigrant rights groups to take a stand against proposed rollbacks to Medi-Cal for immigrant families.” Again, almost all of its members voted to approve the budget and its aforementioned rollbacks.
Republican legislators would let it be known that they had urged their Democratic colleagues to reconsider extending Medi-Cal to undocumented immigrants from its inception, but those warnings were largely disregarded. Similarly, the Latino Caucus excludes Latino legislators from any other Party from joining.
In the end, the Caucus ended up doing exactly what the Republicans asked for—not because Republicans made an argument they found compelling or because Republicans hold inordinate power in Sacramento. Far from it, as Republicans hold a legislative superminority at no proverbial seats at the Latino Caucus table. Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher argues it’s because their veto-proof Democrat majority, which sets and approves the budget, engaged in “reckless spending.”
“[Newsom is] trying to prop up this faulty system, and a big part of it was expanding it to illegal immigrants,” said Gallagher. “It’s not fiscally feasible. It’s ballooning the budget out of control.”
Only one Democrat in the Assembly (Asm. Joaquin Arambula) and another in the Senate (Sen. María Elena Durazo) voted against the budget approval, at least in its initial state. Arambula later voted in favor of the final budget agreement.
All others voted in favor of the budget or abstained, and the vast majority did the former.
Those dissenting Democrats would agree with Republicans on at least one thing: California lawmakers cannot have it both ways. If healthcare for undocumented immigrants is truly a moral imperative—as so many Democratic legislators have long claimed—then it must not be defended exclusively when it is financially inconvenient.
Anything else—especially saying one thing and doing another—is political theater.
