The ICE Medicaid Palantir fight has widened: court filings cited by NPR say immigration officials gave Medicaid data to Palantir after federal health officials improperly shared records on millions of people with ICE. The disclosure matters because the records were sought for immigration enforcement, including address information used to find people for arrest and deportation.
The filings were made public in a motion from more than 20 Democratic attorneys general who sued the Trump administration over a data-sharing agreement between the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and ICE, NPR reported. The states are challenging the administration’s move to give immigration officials access to Medicaid information.
According to NPR, Medicaid officials first improperly shared the data with immigration officials in January. ICE then provided that data to Palantir, the data analytics company that works with government agencies. Palantir also operates an app called ELITE, which NPR has reported is used by ICE agents to display addresses of noncitizens who may be subject to deportation.
What data did ICE share with Palantir?
The challenged Medicaid data included information on millions of people, according to NPR and the court filings it described. Earlier reporting on the agreement said ICE wanted access to Medicaid data containing home addresses and ethnicities, and the Trump administration said the data would help immigration officials identify the “location of aliens.”
Medicaid is a health coverage program, so using its records for immigration enforcement changes the risk calculation for people whose families rely on it. A database built to administer benefits becomes a locator tool when CMS hands it to ICE. That is the mechanism the attorneys general are fighting in court.
Palantir told NPR that its customers control their own data and decide who can access it. The company said that when its employees receive access to a customer dataset, they do so only to help integrate and analyze the information, “not to store it or use it for our own purposes.” Palantir also said the dataset at issue “was purged pursuant to government instruction.”
That statement answers only part of the obvious question. Palantir says the dataset was purged, but the filings described by NPR put the data inside a contractor’s systems after the government’s own sharing was already under legal attack. The company’s position is that it processed customer-controlled data, rather than keeping it for itself.
How did the data get shared again?
The Justice Department told the court in a filing last week that CMS inadvertently reshared with ICE the same dataset containing millions of names that CMS had first improperly provided in January, NPR reported. The government said the mistake happened while it was trying to share data from states that were not part of the lawsuit.
That detail is the messy part with real consequences. Because not every state joined the case, the government was still trying to move some Medicaid data to ICE. According to the Justice Department’s account, that process resulted in the disputed dataset being sent again.
The case now centers on whether the administration can use Medicaid records in immigration enforcement and how far court limits on that sharing reach. For Medicaid recipients, the technical distinction between CMS, ICE and Palantir is cold comfort if the same records can move from a benefits agency to an enforcement database and then into a contractor-run tool used by agents in the field.
This story draws on original reporting from Techdirt.
