Immigrations and Customs Enforcement shared Medicaid data it improperly obtained from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service with Palantir, according to NPR on Friday. The Palantir ICE Medicaid data sharing report centers on records that had already become part of a court fight over how far CMS could go.
More than 20 Democratic states’ attorneys general filed a public motion on Thursday in the ongoing lawsuit challenging CMS’s data-sharing agreement with ICE. Defendants produced documents showing that Medicaid data from Plaintiff States had been shared with employees or contractors of Palantir, and Palantir’s ELITE app is used by ICE agents to show addresses of noncitizens who may be subject to deportation.
Vince Chhabria’s December ruling
Vince Chhabria, a U.S. District Judge in California, ruled in December that CMS officials could share certain details from Medicaid data about immigrants without lawful status from the states involved in the lawsuit. The details he allowed included home addresses, dates of birth and immigration status. That ruling set the boundary the later data-sharing was supposed to stay within.
In January, CMS shared data with ICE that went beyond the scope of what the court had allowed. In May, Chhabria temporarily paused data-sharing between ICE and CMS after that January disclosure became public, and ICE was ordered to delete the improperly obtained data. Federal officials in recent days have admitted to further instances of improper data-sharing, according to NPR.
Plaintiff States documents
The documents filed in court add a new layer to the dispute because they place Medicaid records from Plaintiff States in the hands of employees or contractors of Palantir. For readers whose records sit inside state Medicaid systems, the immediate issue is no longer only what ICE could access, but where that information moved after CMS’s January disclosure.
The unresolved question is exactly which Medicaid data from the Plaintiff States was shared with employees or contractors of Palantir. Until the court addresses that point, the pause on ICE and CMS data-sharing remains the practical barrier between the records already disclosed and any further use of them.
