On August 4, 2026, Jon Husted went on Fox News and said this about the man trying to take his Senate seat:
Sherrod Brown "supported Social Security payments for illegals, healthcare for illegals and COVID checks for illegals."
On August 25, PolitiFact rated that claim False.
Not "mostly false." Not "needs context." False — as in, the three votes Husted's own campaign pointed to would not have handed a single federal dollar to anyone in the country illegally.
The three votes, one at a time
Husted's team gave PolitiFact three roll calls. Here is what each one actually was.
Social Security, July 19, 2007. Brown voted against an amendment that would have stopped immigrants who were once in the country illegally but had since become legal residents from getting Social Security credit for taxes they had already paid.
Read that again. Nobody in this scenario is here illegally. They paid into the system, they gained legal status, and the question was whether the money they'd already paid counted. Any benefit would be collected only after they were legal residents.
Healthcare, March 23, 2013. Brown voted against an amendment from then-Sen. Jeff Sessions saying immigrants in the U.S. illegally shouldn't get federally subsidized healthcare.
They already couldn't. Federal law already barred people in the country illegally from Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program and Affordable Care Act subsidies. The amendment would not have changed who received anything.
COVID checks, March 6, 2021. Brown voted for the American Rescue Plan, which sent $1,400 checks to millions of Americans, and against a Republican amendment to bar checks for anyone "not lawfully present."
The bill already blocked them. It required a valid Social Security number to get a check, which excluded the overwhelming majority of people here illegally. The amendment's backers said they were aiming at a narrower group — some DACA recipients, people brought here as children who have work authorization and Social Security numbers.
That is the whole case. Three votes, none of which did what Husted said they did.
The part Husted left out
Three months after that 2007 Social Security vote, in October 2007, Brown voted in favor of an amendment blocking immigrants from getting Social Security credit for taxes paid while they were in the country illegally.
That is the vote Husted was describing. Brown cast it — on Husted's side.
PolitiFact called this out directly: Husted's assertion "cherry-picked Brown's votes."
There's a second one. The same day as the 2013 healthcare vote, the Senate took up an amendment reaffirming that immigrants here illegally can't receive federal benefits. It passed by voice vote, so no individual names were recorded — but Brown's campaign told PolitiFact he voted for it.
How these votes get manufactured
PolitiFact explained the machinery plainly, and it's worth knowing, because it explains why this ad exists at all:
"Some of the measures he voted on stemmed from a practice both parties engage in: forcing members of the other political party to vote on amendments that don't align with the party's positions, and using those votes in later campaign messaging."
That's the trick. Write an amendment that restates a law already on the books. Attach it to a bill. Dare the other side to vote no on a redundant provision. Then, years later, describe the "no" vote as if the underlying law didn't exist.
Husted is running the third step of that play. Brown ran into the same accusations in 2024 from his then-challenger, Bernie Moreno.
PolitiFact's ruling, in full
"Husted said Brown 'supported Social Security payments for illegals, healthcare for illegals and COVID checks for illegals.'
The votes in question — in 2007, 2013 and 2021, respectively — did not make immigrants in the country illegally eligible for those benefits.
The Social Security vote addressed how past tax payments would be counted for immigrants who later gained legal status. The healthcare vote would not have legalized the payment of benefits to people in the U.S. illegally, because federal law already bars such payments. Similarly, the COVID-19 relief bill already outlawed stimulus payments to the vast majority of people in the U.S. illegally.
We rate this claim False."
This isn't Husted's first fact-check
Ohio's junior senator has a growing file of statements that didn't hold up next to his own record. He told disabled Ohioans his Medicaid vote wouldn't hurt them, then skipped their forum. He told Ohioans their rising electric bills were their own doing, while his own party's campaign memo called his data-center record an "anchor".
The pattern is the same each time: a clean, quotable line for a TV hit, and a record underneath it that says something else.
What this costs Ohio
The word "illegals" does a lot of work in that Fox News sentence. It's meant to make you picture someone getting something you don't get.
What the three votes actually involve: people who paid taxes and later became legal residents, a healthcare ban that was already law, and a check program that already required a Social Security number. Nothing in there is anyone jumping the line.
Ohio has real problems Husted could be talking about on national television. Ohio lost a bigger share of its Obamacare coverage than any state in America. Ohioans' electric bills are climbing. He used his airtime on a claim about his opponent that a fact-checker took apart three weeks later.
What the record shows
On August 4, 2026, Jon Husted told a Fox News audience that Sherrod Brown supported Social Security, healthcare and COVID checks for people in the country illegally. PolitiFact examined the three votes Husted's own campaign supplied and rated the claim False on August 25: none of them would have made anyone here illegally eligible for those benefits. On the Social Security question, Brown voted the way Husted describes just three months later — a vote Husted's campaign didn't mention.
Source
Jon Husted's inaccurate claim that Sherrod Brown voted for benefits for immigrants in US illegally — Cami Henry-Seymore, PolitiFact, August 25, 2026.
