After Medicaid officials improperly shared data about millions of people in January with immigration officials, ICE then shared that data with the data analytics firm Palantir, according to new court filings.Palantir operates an app called ELITE that is used by ICE agents to show the addresses of noncitizens who may be subject to deportation.That revelation was made public in a motion filed Thursday by more than 20 Democratic attorneys general who sued the Trump administration last year over its data-sharing agreement between the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and ICE.U.S.
District Judge Vince Chhabria in California ruled in December that health officials could share with ICE certain details from Medicaid data about immigrants without lawful status from the states that had sued, such as home addresses, dates of birth and immigration status.Chhabria, who was appointed by former President Obama, then temporarily paused data sharing between CMS and ICE for immigration enforcement purposes in late May after federal officials admitted CMS had shared data with ICE in January that went beyond what the court order allowed.One dataset of refugees in Minnesota included U.S.
citizens, and another that was transferred on Jan.7 contained data of millions of people, including those in the country legally.ICE was supposed to delete the improperly shared data.
Chhabria set a hearing for August to further clarify his order and clear up ambiguity regarding which categories of noncitizens' data could be lawfully shared with ICE.But in recent days, federal officials have admitted to additional instances of improper data sharing.In a court filing last week, the Justice Department said that CMS again inadvertently reshared with ICE the dataset with millions of names that CMS had first improperly shared with ICE in January.The government said the error occurred during an effort to share data from states not involved in the lawsuit.Alberto Briseno, a section chief for ICE's...