Trump administration allows ICE to gain access to medicaid data to find illegal immigrants: Report

US President Donald Trump’s administration is empowering the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) even more after it was revealed that the body will be given access to the personal data of the nation’s 79 million Medicaid enrollees. The data would include home addresses and ethnicities, and is intended to track down immigrants who may not be living in the United States legally, The Associated Press reported.

The information will give ICE officials the ability to find “the location of aliens” across the country, says the agreement obtained by The Associated Press on Monday. The agreement was signed between the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Department of Homeland Security and has not been publicly announced as of now.

The extraordinary disclosure of millions of such personal health data to deportation officials is the latest escalation in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, which has repeatedly tested legal boundaries in its effort to arrest 3,000 people daily.

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The backlash that followed

Lamakers and some CMS officials are challenging the legality of the ICE officials getting access to some states’ Medicaid enrollee data. “ICE will use the CMS data to allow ICE to receive identity and location information on aliens identified by ICE,” the agreement says.

The US Health and Human Services (HHS) came out in defence of the agreement. “HHS and CMS take the integrity of the Medicaid program and the protection of American taxpayer dollars extremely seriously,” HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard told The Guardian.

“With respect to the recent data sharing between CMS and DHS, HHS acted entirely within its legal authority – and in full compliance with all applicable laws – to ensure that Medicaid benefits are reserved for individuals who are lawfully entitled to receive them,” Hillard added.

It is important to note that the agreement does not allow ICE officials to download the data. Instead, they will be allowed to access it for a limited period from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, until September 9. “They are trying to turn us into immigration agents,” a CMS official who asked to remain anonymous told AP.

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The move came two months after the Trump administration defended the data-sharing agreement as part of an effort to ensure undocumented migrants who are not eligible for the program did not receive benefits. “President Trump consistently promised to protect Medicaid for eligible beneficiaries,” said the DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin at that time.

“To keep that promise after Joe Biden flooded our country with tens of millions of illegal aliens, CMS and DHS are exploring an initiative to ensure that illegal aliens are not receiving Medicaid benefits that are meant for law-abiding Americans," McLaughlin furthered.

It is pertinent to note that undocumented migrants are generally not eligible for Medicaid, and only some lawfully present migrants may obtain coverage under the program. According to the healthcare research non-profit Kaiser Family Foundation, eligible noncitizen immigrants represent only about 6 per cent of people currently enrolled in Medicaid.

“This is a privacy violation of unprecedented proportions and betrayal of trust, as the government has explicitly said, for decades, that this information will never be used for immigration enforcement,” said Ben D’Avanzo, a healthcare strategist at the National Immigration Law Centre on X.

With inputs from The Associated Press.