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.
Palantir said in a statement to NPR that the dataset in question had been purged.
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 Homeland Security Investigations, wrote in a declaration that ICE personnel deleted the file after it was discovered and it was not used for law enforcement purposes.
Then Briseno revealed that a day later, the agency had done a broader search and discovered that half a dozen users still had a copy of the Jan. 7 dataset.
In that most recent declaration, Briseno said he was not aware of any additional copies of the dataset, but said the recent searches have "highlighted technological difficulties of making a representation that every possible variation of the file has been searched for and located." He added, "ICE will continue to make good faith efforts to delete any copies that may be found in the future."
Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is asking the judge to expand his order to allow ICE to receive data on a broader category of noncitizens – to potentially include all immigrants who are not legal permanent residents, citizens or have another form of permanent status.
"ICE's inability to identify Medicaid records in its possession undercuts any claim that the agency should be entitled to more access to that data," the Democratic attorneys generals wrote in their motion filed late Thursday.
Their motion continued, "Each successive revelation of a violation of the Order makes it more difficult for Plaintiff States to have confidence in Defendants' ability to maintain and secure this data in compliance with the Order, and more difficult for Plaintiff States to communicate assurances to Medicaid providers, enrollees (and their counsel), and the public at large about the privacy and confidentiality of their healthcare data."
Palantir provided the following statement to NPR: "Our customers control their own data and manage access to that data. When Palantir employees are granted access to a customer's dataset, it is solely to help integrate and analyze that data — which is what our software does — not to store it or use it for our own purposes. Palantir can confirm that the dataset in question was purged pursuant to government instruction."
DHS didn't immediately return a request for comment about its transfer of data to Palantir.
According to a declaration filed by California deputy attorney general Anna Rich, when plaintiffs asked what federal officials did to ensure Palantir and other contractors had purged the data, defendants responded that the data had been shared over a Microsoft Teams chat and the shared data was deleted from the chat. Rich shared in her declaration a document turned over in discovery from federal officials that shows a redacted transcript of what appears to be ICE personnel asking Palantir to delete the file.
In an April 30 hearing, Chhabria had warned the federal government would not be able to continue using Medicaid data for deportation efforts if it continued improperly sharing the data of citizens and legal immigrants.
"If the federal government cannot be sufficiently careful then it can't use the information, ok?" Chhabria had said.
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