Immigration officials improperly shared millions of Medicaid records with the data analytics firm Palantir, according to new court filings that have intensified a legal battle over the Trump administration’s use of healthcare data for deportation efforts.
The revelation came in a motion filed Thursday by more than 20 Democratic attorneys general who sued the administration last year over a data-sharing agreement between the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and ICE.
ICE then shared that data with Palantir, which operates an app called ELITE used by ICE agents to show the addresses of noncitizens who may be subject to deportation.
The Data Breaches
The improper sharing has occurred multiple times, despite court orders to stop.
In January, CMS shared a dataset containing millions of names — including US citizens and legal immigrants — with ICE. The data went beyond what a federal judge had allowed.
In May, the judge temporarily paused data sharing after federal officials admitted CMS had shared data with ICE that went beyond the court order. One dataset of refugees in Minnesota included US citizens.
ICE was supposed to delete the improperly shared data. But in a recent court filing, the Justice Department admitted that CMS again inadvertently reshared the dataset with ICE during an effort to share data from states not involved in the lawsuit.
ICE personnel deleted the file after it was discovered, but a broader search found that half a dozen users still had copies of the January dataset.
An ICE official acknowledged “technological difficulties” in ensuring all copies were deleted, saying the agency would “continue to make good faith efforts to delete any copies that may be found in the future.”
The Palantir Connection
According to a declaration filed by California Deputy Attorney General Anna Rich, when plaintiffs asked what federal officials did to ensure Palantir and other contractors had purged the data, defendants responded that the data had been shared over a Microsoft Teams chat and the shared data was deleted from the chat.
Rich shared a document from discovery that shows a redacted transcript of what appears to be ICE personnel asking Palantir to delete the file.
Palantir did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether the company had deleted the dataset.
The Judge’s Warning
US District Judge Vince Chhabria, who is overseeing the case, has grown increasingly frustrated with the repeated violations.
“If the federal government cannot be sufficiently careful then it can’t use the information, ok?” Chhabria said during an April 30 hearing.
The judge had temporarily paused data sharing in May and set a hearing for August to clarify his order.
The States’ Argument
The Democratic attorneys general argue that the repeated data breaches undermine confidence in the administration’s ability to handle sensitive information.
“ICE’s inability to identify Medicaid records in its possession undercuts any claim that the agency should be entitled to more access to that data,” they wrote in their motion.
They warned that “each successive revelation of a violation of the Order makes it more difficult for Plaintiff States to have confidence in Defendants’ ability to maintain and secure this data.”
Meanwhile, the Justice Department is asking the judge to expand his order to allow ICE to receive data on a broader category of noncitizens.
The Bottom Line
ICE improperly shared millions of Medicaid records with data firm Palantir after CMS mishandled the data, according to new court filings. The revelation is the latest in a series of data breaches that have drawn a federal judge’s ire. The judge has warned that continued mishandling could end the administration’s use of Medicaid data for deportation efforts. The case is set for a hearing in August.
