Chip Roy Bill Has Democrats Up In Arms Over One Question It Requires Hospitals to Ask

Florida State Senator Victor Torres once called a hospital immigration question a scare tactic.

Chip Roy just turned that same question into federal legislation covering every hospital in America.

Hospitals that refuse to ask would risk losing everything Washington sends them.

Florida Democrat Victor Torres Called This Question a Scare Tactic

State Sen. Victor Torres represents Osceola County, Florida.

When Republicans passed a law forcing hospitals to ask patients about their immigration status, Torres dismissed the whole idea.

He called it "a scare tactic by the Republicans."

Torres argued that immigrants without legal status were already pulling their weight through work and taxes, without collecting the benefits Republicans said they were draining.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) just built the national test of that claim.

Roy's Illegal Alien Patient Reporting Act would require every hospital that takes federal health care money to ask that exact same question on intake forms.

Hospitals would then report the aggregate numbers to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security every quarter.

Those numbers would break down citizens, green card holders, visa holders, and illegal aliens.

Refuse to ask, and a hospital would get shut out of federal health care programs entirely.

"That lack of accountability is unacceptable and absurd," Roy told Breitbart News.

The bill does not touch a single patient's care.

Every hospital in the country will still be legally required to treat every person who walks in, exactly as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act has demanded since Reagan signed it in 1986.

What changes is whether Washington finally has to write down what that care costs.

And who is paying for it.

Sanctuary State Math Already Proved Torres Wrong

Florida already ran this experiment.

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a 2023 law forcing hospitals that take Medicaid money to track immigration status, over Torres's objections.

The state's own health agency came back with a number Torres never wanted published: $566 million spent on care for illegal aliens in a single year.

Texas followed with Gov. Greg Abbott's 2024 executive order demanding the same accounting from public hospitals.

Roy's bill takes that experiment national.

Immigration policy groups already peg the health care price tag for illegal aliens above $40 billion a year nationwide.

Roy's own one-pager cites a separate estimate of at least $21 billion in state and local spending – and calls that a floor, not a ceiling.

That number only grows after ten million illegal aliens crossed the border during the Biden-Harris years.

Daniel West, government outreach director for Heritage Action, did not mince words about what the bill exposes.

"The American people deserve to know the true costs of illegals siphoning care," West said.

Immigration enforcement groups lined up behind Roy within hours of the bill's release.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform, the Immigration Accountability Project, and the National Immigration Center for Enforcement all issued statements backing the legislation.

Their message to Democrats was blunt: if illegal aliens are truly paying their way, prove it with numbers instead of talking points.

That is the trap built into this bill.

Torres now has legislation in front of him that would generate the receipts on his own claim.

Vote against it, and he is voting against transparency.

Vote for it, and he hands Republicans the exact data Roy needs to make his case permanent.

Roy's bill also protects individual patients from being reported to law enforcement.

The reporting requirement covers only aggregate totals, and the legislation explicitly bars HHS and DHS from collecting names or other personal identifiers.

The only exceptions cover aliens already suspected of specific state, local, or federal crimes.

It also forces Congress to look at those numbers every year, through an annual HHS report to lawmakers beginning in 2026 that tallies what illegal immigration costs the health care system nationwide.

Torres called the question a scare tactic.

Congress is about to find out if he was right.

Sources:

• Jasmyn Jordan, "Exclusive: Chip Roy Unveils Bill Requiring Hospitals Participating in Federal Healthcare Programs to Report Immigration Status Data," Breitbart, July 13, 2026.
• Pedro Rodriguez, "Hospitals Would Report Social Security Recipients' Immigration Status Under New Bill," Daily Signal, July 13, 2026.
• Federation for American Immigration Reform, "New FAIR Report: Annual Costs of Illegal Immigration Soars to $150.7 Billion a Year," FAIR, 2024.
• Stateline (States Newsroom), "Need to Go to the Hospital? Texas and Florida Want to Know Your Immigration Status," October 3, 2024.