Immigrations and Customs Enforcement shared Medicaid data it improperly obtained from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service with Palantir, according to documents cited in a new court filing that sharpened the fight over how far federal officials can go with state health records. The latest disclosure adds another layer to a legal clash that had already forced a judge to curb part of the data flow in May.
The issue surfaced on Friday after more than 20 Democratic states’ attorneys general filed a public motion on Thursday in the lawsuit challenging CMS’s data-sharing agreement with ICE. The motion said defendants produced documents confirming that Medicaid data from plaintiff states had been shared with employees or contractors of Palantir, the company behind the ELITE app ICE agents use to display addresses of noncitizens who may be subject to deportation.
That detail matters because the data at issue is not abstract. It includes home addresses, dates of birth and immigration status, information that can make it easier to identify people in the government’s crosshairs. In December, Vince Chhabria initially ruled that CMS officials could share certain details from Medicaid data about immigrants without lawful status from the states involved in the lawsuit, but that permission was not unlimited. Federal officials later shared data in January that went beyond what had been allowed, and in May Chhabria temporarily paused data-sharing between ICE and CMS after that overreach came to light.
The new filing suggests the problem did not stop there. It points to a second round of improper handling, this time involving Palantir, even though ICE had already been ordered to delete the improperly obtained data. In recent days, federal officials admitted to further instances of improper data-sharing, according to NPR, strengthening the states’ argument that the system has moved beyond the narrow terms set by the court.
What remains unclear is the exact scope of what Palantir received and who inside the company saw it. The motion says the records show Medicaid data from plaintiff states reached employees or contractors of Palantir, but it does not spell out each field or identify the recipients. That unanswered question now sits at the center of the lawsuit: whether the government can keep using sensitive Medicaid records in a way the court has already found too broad, or whether this latest disclosure will force another round of limits.
