A sprawling legal fight over the federal government’s use of health records for immigration enforcement took a new turn this week, as court filings revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement shared improperly obtained Medicaid data with Palantir, the data analytics firm that builds some of the agency’s key deportation tools. The revelations, first detailed by NPR, add fresh fuel to a lawsuit brought by more than 20 Democratic state attorneys general.
What the Filings Show
According to NPR’s reporting, officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services improperly shared datasets containing information on millions of people with ICE in January. One dataset transmitted on January 7 included U.S. citizens and legally present immigrants — categories of people whose data went beyond what any court had authorized the government to share. A separate dataset concerning refugees in Minnesota also included American citizens.
ICE then passed that data along to Palantir. As NPR reported, Palantir operates ELITE, an app used by ICE agents in the field that can display the addresses of noncitizens potentially subject to deportation — which is precisely why the presence of citizens’ and lawful residents’ health data in the pipeline has alarmed the states suing the administration. The government says the problematic material has been destroyed: the deletion was documented in a partially redacted Microsoft Teams chat transcript filed with the court, per KPBS.
Alberto Briseno, a section chief in ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division, told the court that ICE personnel deleted the file upon discovering the problem and that it was never used for enforcement, adding that “ICE will continue to make good faith efforts to delete any copies that may be found in the future,” according to KPBS.
A Judge Losing Patience
The disclosures land in a case that has already tested the court’s patience. U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria ruled late last year that health officials could lawfully share certain Medicaid details with ICE, but by late May he paused the data sharing entirely after learning of the improper January transfers. Court filings have since revealed additional unauthorized resharing — including an episode in which CMS accidentally retransmitted the very January dataset it was supposed to have clawed back, per KPBS.
At a recent hearing, Chhabria issued a pointed warning to the government. “If the federal government cannot be sufficiently careful then it can’t use the information, ok?” the judge said, as NPR reported. The states, in their own motion, argued that “each successive revelation of a violation of the Order makes it more difficult for Plaintiff States to have confidence” in the administration’s handling of the data.
The Bigger Battle Over Health Data
The lawsuit, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, challenges the underlying data-sharing agreement between CMS and ICE that allows Medicaid enrollment information to be used for deportation enforcement. The states argue that turning a health program’s records into an immigration enforcement tool not only exceeds legal authority but risks chilling enrollment among eligible people — including citizens in mixed-status families — who fear their information could end up in an enforcement database.
The next milestone comes in August, when Chhabria has scheduled a hearing to clarify exactly which categories of noncitizens’ data can lawfully be shared with ICE going forward. Until then, the pause on data sharing remains in place — and the filings suggest the court will be watching the government’s data-handling practices very closely. For millions of Medicaid enrollees, the outcome will help define where the line sits between administering a public health program and policing immigration status.
The case is also being watched far beyond the courtroom because of what it signals about the government’s broader data practices. Privacy advocates have long warned that information collected for one purpose — enrolling in a health program, applying for a benefit, filing taxes — can migrate into enforcement systems once agencies begin sharing databases, and the filings in this case document exactly that pathway in unusual detail, down to the redacted chat transcript used to prove a file was deleted. That level of visibility into interagency data flows is rare, and it is likely to shape how future courts scrutinize similar agreements.
For now, the practical stakes are concentrated in the August hearing. If Judge Chhabria narrows the categories of data that can flow to ICE, the administration would lose a significant enforcement resource; if he lifts the pause with conditions, the states will be left policing compliance violation by violation — a task their own motion suggests they no longer trust the government to make easy. Either way, the record now shows that data from one of America’s largest health programs reached a private contractor’s deportation tooling without authorization, and that fact will follow this litigation to its end.
