Vance and Oz blamed immigrants for California Medicaid fraud that HHS's own watchdog later traced mainly to corporations

At a White House press conference on May 13, 2026, Vice President JD Vance said "there could be tens of billions, hundreds of billions of fraudulent payments within the California system, if you count what's going to illegal aliens, if you count what's going to people, fraudulent businesses." Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz told reporters that of $200 million in "questionable expenditures" the administration was stopping, "much of that is linked to immigration-related costs, folks who are undocumented." The same press conference announced a freeze on new Medicare home-health and hospice providers and a deferral of $1.3 billion in Medicaid reimbursements to California over the state's handling of fraud. Later that same month, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller made a similar claim, saying the federal budget could be balanced "if the only dollars that went out of the Treasury went to individuals who were properly lawfully correctly eligible to receive them."

An HHS Office of Inspector General semiannual report to Congress, covering October 2025 through March 2026 and released in July 2026, described the agency's enforcement actions against healthcare fraud during that period. The cases it highlighted involved corporate and provider fraud — including a CEO who ran a scheme billing Medicare for medically unnecessary devices and a broker who orchestrated an Affordable Care Act enrollment scam targeting homeless and substance-abuse-vulnerable people — and did not mention immigrants or immigration status as a driver of the fraud it identified.

Immigration and healthcare policy researchers said the administration's public rhetoric was not supported by evidence. "There isn't really clear evidence of any systemic issues implicating immigrants," said Sarah Krieger of the National Immigration Law Center, who noted the administration had separately granted clemency to healthcare executives convicted of large-scale Medicare fraud schemes. Data cited in reporting on the episode indicates noncitizens are less likely than citizens to commit welfare fraud.