Judge Orders RFK Jr’s HHS to Stop Sharing Medicaid Data With Immigration Officials
A federal judge ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to stop providing access to Medicaid enrollees’ personal data, including their home addresses, to immigration officials.
District Judge Vince Chhabria, an Obama appointee, granted a preliminary injunction blocking the Department of Homeland Security from using Medicaid data obtained from 20 states that filed a lawsuit to stop the data sharing.
The order, handed down Tuesday, blocks HHS from sharing data on Medicaid enrollees in these states with Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the purpose of targeting migrants for deportation.
“Using CMS data for immigration enforcement threatens to significantly disrupt the operation of Medicaid—a program that Congress has deemed critical for the provision of health coverage to the nation’s most vulnerable residents,” Chhabria wrote.
The judge wrote that while there is nothing “categorically unlawful” about DHS collecting data from other agencies for immigration enforcement purposes, ICE has had a policy against using Medicaid data for that reason for 12 years. (Read more from “Judge Orders RFK Jr’s HHS to Stop Sharing Medicaid Data With Immigration Officials” HERE)
