California senators demand Trump immigration officials stop using Medicaid data

WASHINGTON (AP) — California’s two U.S. senators demanded on Wednesday that the Trump administration stop using personal data of millions of Medicaid enrollees — including their immigration status — as part of its sweeping deportation campaign.

In a letter to top administration officials, Democratic Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla expressed alarm over an Associated Press report last week that detailed how deportation officials had obtained the sensitive data over the objections of career health officials. They wrote that health officials needed to stop sharing the information and that the Department of Homeland Security should “destroy any and all such data” it had obtained.

The data transfer, the senators wrote, posed serious ethical issues and “significant concerns about possible violations of federal” privacy laws.

Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services declined to comment on the letter. In a statement last week, an HHS spokesman said the department “acted entirely within its legal authority” and that the effort was “focused on identifying waste, fraud and systemic abuse.” A statement issued by HHS’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said it will review the letter and “respond directly to appropriate officials.”

DHS officials did not respond to requests for comment.

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The AP reported that CMS transferred the data last week to DHS officials. Internal CMS records obtained by the AP showed the Medicaid agency fought the request, arguing that sharing the data would violate rules and federal law. Trump appointees overruled them, giving CMS a 54-minute deadline to share the information with DHS, according to emails obtained by AP.

The transfer comes “as the Trump administration continues to target noncitizens,” the senators wrote in their letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz.

“We are deeply troubled that this administration intends to use individuals’ private health information for the unrelated purpose of possible enforcement actions targeting lawful noncitizens and mixed status families,” the senators wrote.

The dataset provided to DHS includes the information of people living in California, Illinois, Washington state and Washington, D.C., all of which allow non-U. S. citizens to enroll in Medicaid programs that pay for their expenses using only state taxpayer dollars.

Besides helping authorities locate migrants, experts said, the Trump administration could eventually use the information to scuttle the hopes of migrants seeking green cards, permanent residency or citizenship if they had ever obtained Medicaid benefits funded by the federal government.

CMS transferred the information just as the administration was ramping up its enforcement efforts in Southern California.

Schiff and Padilla said the decision by HHS to share the information was “a remarkable departure from established federal privacy protections that should alarm all Americans.”

The senators gave the administration a July 9 deadline to provide to provide copies of communications between the agencies regarding the data transfer, details about the personal information provided to DHS and an accounting for how homeland security officials intend to use it.