Officials let Ice access health data to locate migrants, alarming experts who warn of civil rights and health risks
Medicaid officials have reportedly made an agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to allow agents to examine a database of Americans’ personal information – including home addresses, social security numbers and ethnicities.
The data sharing agreement will allow Ice to find “the location of aliens”, according to an agreement obtained by the Associated Press. Medicaid is the nation’s single largest health insurer, providing coverage for 79 million low-income, disabled and elderly people.
“This is about the weaponization of data, full stop,” said Pramila Jayapal, a Democratic US representative from Washington state, who has worked extensively on US healthcare, in a statement on social media.
“Trump said he would go after the ‘worst of the worst’ immigrants, yet now is giving ICE EVERYONE’s Medicaid data, even as ICE targets US citizens. Oh, and undocumented immigrants can’t even enroll in Medicaid.”
The AP first reported the existence of an agreement between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) in June. Trump administration officials reportedly overrode the warnings of career civil servants who said such a data sharing arrangement would violate multiple statutes at the insistence of top aides to the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.
“Multiple federal statutory and regulatory authorities do not permit CMS to share this information with entities outside of CMS,” Medicaid’s deputy director, Sara Vitolo, wrote, according to a memo obtained by the AP in June.
