Trump administration hands over personal data of 79 million Medicaid enrollees to ICE
An agreement signed Monday between the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Department of Homeland Security has given U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement access to the personal data of all Medicaid enrollees, according to a report from The Associated Press.
This will give the agency access to 79 million people’s private information, including home addresses and ethnicities, for the purpose of finding “the location of aliens,” according to the report.
The agreement, which has not been publicly announced as of July 17, does not allow ICE officials to download the data, AP News reports.
Instead, they will be allowed to access it for a limited period from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, until Sept. 9.
Efforts to reach U.S. Sens. Katie Britt, R-Ala. and Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala. for comment on the agreement were not immediately successful.
This is the latest move in the President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, which is currently striving to arrest 3,000 people daily, according to previous comments from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
Although immigrants who are not living in the U.S. legally, as well as some lawfully present immigrants, are not allowed to enroll in the Medicaid program, federal law requires all states to offer emergency Medicaid, a temporary coverage that pays only for lifesaving services in emergency rooms to anyone, including non-U.S. citizens.
“It’s unthinkable that CMS [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] would violate the trust of Medicaid enrollees in this way,” Hannah Katch, a previous adviser at CMS during the Biden administration, told AP News.
She added that the personally identifiable information of enrollees has not been historically shared outside of the agency unless for law enforcement purposes to investigate waste, fraud or abuse of the program.
Last month, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s advisers ordered the release of a dataset that includes the private health information of people living in California, Illinois, Washington state, and Washington, D.C., to the Department of Homeland Security.
All of those states allow non-U.S. citizens to enroll in Medicaid programs that pay for their expenses using only state taxpayer dollars.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta and 19 other states’ attorneys general have sued over the move, saying it violated federal privacy laws.
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