Senate Altered Tax Reform to Help Illegal Aliens Claim Child Tax Credit

Evidence emerged Monday, as Republicans celebrated the Senate’s passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, that small changes were made in the Senate to the bill’s language, which would allow illegal aliens to continue to claim the child tax credit.

Preventing the use of this important credit by illegals was a priority for some of the Republican tax reform plan’s most ardent supporters. Under existing law, one does not need a Social Security Number (SSN) to claim the benefit but can substitute an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN), as illegal aliens frequently do.

Rep. Luke Messer (R-IN) made sure that a fix to this long-standing discrepancy was included in the House version of the tax bill. When the bill came out of chairman Kevin Brady’s (R-TX) House Ways and Means Committee, it included the language Messer originally inserted, demanding a credit claimant include “the taxpayer’s Social Security number on the return of tax for such taxable year.” This language would have blocked illegal aliens, who lack real SSNs, from claiming the lucrative benefit.

Yet when the Senate marked up the bill, the language was tweaked..

More details here