Sensitive Medicaid records that federal authorities had no legal right to hold were passed along to the data analytics contractor Palantir by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to a motion filed Thursday by more than 20 Democratic attorneys general challenging a data-sharing arrangement between ICE and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Palantir runs a tool called ELITE, an application ICE agents rely on to surface addresses of noncitizens potentially facing deportation. The attorneys general's filing disclosed that after CMS handed improperly obtained data to ICE in January, the agency subsequently passed that information to Palantir.

The chain of unauthorized transfers traces back to January, when CMS turned over to ICE a dataset covering millions of individuals — among them U.S. citizens and people residing in the country with legal authorization. That handover went further than what U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria, an Obama appointee, had sanctioned in a December ruling. His order had permitted health officials to share limited Medicaid details — such as home addresses, birth dates, and immigration status — only for immigrants without lawful status in the plaintiff states.

After federal officials conceded that the January transfer had exceeded the scope of his order, Chhabria halted CMS-to-ICE data sharing for immigration enforcement purposes in late May. Among the problematic transfers: a refugee dataset from Minnesota that contained U.S. citizens, and a January 7 file holding records on millions of people, including those legally in the country. The judge directed ICE to destroy the improperly obtained data and scheduled an August hearing to sharpen the boundaries of his order.

Further admissions of unauthorized sharing emerged in the days that followed. A Justice Department court filing last week acknowledged that CMS had inadvertently re-shared with ICE the same massive January dataset — this time during an attempt to provide records from states not party to the lawsuit.

Alberto Briseno, a section chief within ICE's Homeland Security Investigations division, stated in a declaration that agency personnel deleted the file upon discovering it and that it was never used for law enforcement purposes. He then disclosed that a broader internal search conducted the following day turned up half a dozen users who still retained copies of the January 7 dataset. In a subsequent declaration, Briseno acknowledged he could not confirm that every possible version of the file had been located, citing technological limitations, but said ICE would continue making good-faith efforts to destroy any copies that surface going forward.

Separately, the Justice Department is pressing Chhabria to broaden his order, seeking permission for ICE to obtain Medicaid data on a wider population of noncitizens — potentially encompassing all immigrants who are not legal permanent residents, citizens, or holders of some other form of permanent status.

The coalition of Democratic attorneys general argued in their motion that ICE's demonstrated inability to track which Medicaid records it holds fatally undermines any case for granting the agency wider access. They contended that each successive disclosure of a violation makes it harder for plaintiff states to have confidence in the defendants' ability to maintain and secure the data in compliance with the order, and more difficult for the states to communicate assurances to Medicaid providers, enrollees and the public about the privacy and confidentiality of their healthcare data.

California Deputy Attorney General Anna Rich detailed in a declaration how plaintiffs had asked what steps federal officials took to ensure Palantir and other contractors had purged the records. Officials responded that the data had been transmitted via a Microsoft Teams chat and that the shared file was subsequently deleted from that chat. Rich included a discovery document containing a redacted transcript that appears to show ICE personnel directing Palantir to delete the file.

Palantir did not comment in the source account. DHS also did not comment in the source account.

At an April 30 hearing, Chhabria put the government on notice that continued mishandling of citizens' and legal immigrants' records would cost it access to Medicaid data for deportation purposes altogether. As quoted in the court record, the judge stated that if the federal government cannot be sufficiently careful then it cannot use the information.

This rewrite is based solely on the source material provided and contains no independently reported facts.

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