


The Trump administration is allowing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to access the personal information of Medicaid enrollees to assist them in catching illegal immigrants.
ICE will now be able to access the home address and ethnicities, as well as other personal information, of nearly 79 million Medicaid enrollees. The arrangement has not been announced yet.
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Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told NBC News that the agreement between DHS and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is “an initiative” to ensure undocumented immigrants don’t access Medicaid benefits.
The Trump administration is trying to ramp up deportations as ICE recently received billions of new funding from the One Big Beautiful Act. About 56,000 migrants are in ICE detention centers, and a report from June indicated their daily arrest quotas are around 3,000 people.
The Medicaid information provided to ICE will be in a database that includes the names, addresses, birth dates, ethnic and racial information, as well as Social Security numbers for all people enrolled in Medicaid, the Associated Press reported.
The outlet also reported that ICE will use the identity and location data to find and arrest people who they believe are in the country illegally.
Illegal immigrants are already barred from using Medicaid, but federal law allows for emergency Medicaid to those who need emergency room care regardless of their immigration status.
Hannah Katch, a former CMS adviser during the Biden administration, told the Associated Press that the arrangement “violates the trust” between CMS and Medicaid enrollees. “It’s unthinkable that CMS would violate the trust of Medicaid enrollees in this way,” Katch said. She added that information isn’t typically shared unless for law enforcement purposes in the waste, fraud, and abuse realm.
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Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) decried the agreement. “The massive transfer of the personal data of millions of Medicaid recipients should alarm every American. This massive violation of our privacy laws must be halted immediately,” Schiff told the Associated Press. “It will harm families across the nation and only cause more citizens to forego lifesaving access to healthcare.”
The Trump administration has been split on what the data will be used for. The Health and Human Services Department said it will be used to find whether noncitizens were improperly accessing Medicaid benefits, while DHS said in the agreement that it will be used for deportation purposes.