Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden (Ore.), Cory Booker (N.J.), Jeff Merkley (Ore.) and Chris Van Hollen (Md.) stated in a letter that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) admitted to sharing protected Medicaid information of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents to immigration enforcement authorities on three occasions, in violation of a court injunction.
Under a federal injunction issued in December from District Judge Vince Chhabria in California, HHS could share only basic data, such as addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and citizenship or immigration status. The ruling also barred ICE from collecting information on lawful permanent residents or citizens.
“The Trump administration’s lawlessness and abuse of sensitive health information brazenly infringes on enrollee privacy,” the senators wrote in separate letters to the HHS and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
But the administration admitted in court filings that on Jan. 7, the HHS shared with ICE a spreadsheet containing Medicaid data on millions of enrollees in the plaintiff states — including data on U.S. citizens and people lawfully residing in the country — that it “should not have shared” and that was “inconsistent with the injunction.”
On Jan. 19, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) sent ICE a spreadsheet with the biographical information of nearly 6,000 refugees in Minnesota.
The administration characterized the transfer as inadvertent in court filings and claimed that ICE deleted the file from DHS systems.
But the senators said they didn’t buy that excuse. They demanded answers from the agencies, including the names of the officials responsible for data sharing, communications and warnings between the HHS and ICE about whether information from U.S. citizens was being shared,
