The Trump administration will give Immigration and Customs Enforcement access to the personal data of nearly 79 million Medicaid enrollees, a trove that includes names, addresses, birth dates, race and ethnicity, and Social Security numbers, according to an agreement obtained by The Associated Press.
What Happened: Homeland Security officials tell AP that the deal with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will help verify that undocumented immigrants are not using the program, even though federal law already bars most from full Medicaid coverage.
ICE analysts may query the database only on weekdays between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. and cannot download files, but critics fear the information will guide large‑scale raids.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta is seeking an immediate court order to block the hand‑over, calling it an “unprecedented” privacy breach that will deter families from seeking medical care. Nineteen states, including New York and Oregon, joined an earlier lawsuit arguing the plan violates the Medicaid Act and the Tenth Amendment.
Advocates note that emergency Medicaid already covers anyone needing life‑saving treatment regardless of status and warn that the new cross‑check amounts to a deportation dragnet. "It is devastating to think that individuals may not seek essential medical care because they are afraid that if they do so, they may be targeted by this Administration,” Bonta said.
Why It Matters: The Medicaid pact surfaces the same week Politico revealed the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is quietly building software that would let ICE pull taxpayer addresses and phone numbers on demand — a project privacy lawyers say could upend long‑standing limits on sharing return data.
The report reveals that the IRS tool was green‑lit after the agency ousted its acting general counsel for resisting a similar request covering 7.3 million records.
The twin data flows could merge into what Bonta refers to as a "mass‑deportation machine" just as the White House pushes to remove 3,000 people per day.
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