President Barack Obama is putting on a full-court press during March Madness to push Obamacare before the March 31 deadline for 2014, and on Tuesday he went on a Spanish-language sports talk radio show to tell Hispanics that the “immigration people” will not deport their family members who may be illegal immigrants if legal Hispanics sign up for Obamacare.
The White House has been emphasizing this point in recent weeks because it believes some Hispanics are not signing up for Obamacare because they are afraid that family members who are in the United States illegally will then get deported if they reveal that information in the application forms.
Obama went on Univision Deportes, a Spanish-language sports radio show, and said that people “should not hold back just because they’re in a mixed-family status,” saying, “You know, you will qualify, you know, regardless of what your family’s status is.”
“Well, the main thing for people to know is that any information you get, you know, asked with respect to buying insurance, does not have anything to do with … the rules governing immigration,” Obama said, according to The Hill. “And you know, you can qualify if you’re a legal resident, if you are … legally present in the United States. You know, if you have a family where some people are citizens or legally here, and others are not documented, the immigration people will never get that information.”
On Monday, Roy Williams and Geno Auriemma pushed a website that advertised Obamacare–except the links were broken and did not redirect visitors to the Healthcare.gov website. Obama is expected to unveil his brackets on Wednesday and administration officials are pushing Obama’s agenda across many different sports platforms to milk all they can out of March Madness.