Trump adminration hands over nation’s Medicaid enrollee data, including addresses, to ICE | World News

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials will be given access to the personal data of the nation’s 79 million Medicaid enrollees, including home addresses and ethnicities, to track down immigrants who may not be living legally in the United States, according to an agreement obtained The Associated Press.
The information will give ICE officials the ability to find “the location of aliens” across the country, says the agreement signed Monday between the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Department of Homeland Security. The agreement has not been announced publicly.
The extraordinary disclosure of millions of such personal health data to deportation officials is the latest escalation in the Trump adminration’s immigration crackdown, which has repeatedly tested legal boundaries in its effort to arrest 3,000 people daily.
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Lawmakers and some CMS officials have challenged the legality of deportation officials’ access to some states’ Medicaid enrollee data. It’s a move, first reported the AP last month, that Health and Human Services officials said was aimed at rooting out people enrolled in the program improperly.
But the latest data-sharing agreement makes clear what ICE officials intend to do with the health data.
“ICE will use the CMS data to allow ICE to receive identity and location information on aliens identified ICE,” the agreement says.
HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon would not respond to the latest agreement. It is unclear, though, whether Homeland Security has yet accessed the information. The department’s assant secretary, Tricia McLaughlin, said in an emailed statement that the two agencies “are exploring an initiative to ensure that illegal aliens are not receiving Medicaid benefits that are meant for law-abiding Americans.”