ICE Sent Improperly Shared Medicaid Data to Palantir's Deportation-Tracking App, Court Filing Says

ICE shared Medicaid data it wasn't supposed to have with Palantir Technologies, the data analytics firm whose ELITE app helps agents locate noncitizens for deportation, according to a motion filed Thursday by more than 20 Democratic state attorneys general in federal court in California.

The filing is the latest development in a lawsuit those states brought against the Trump administration over a data-sharing arrangement between the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and ICE. The core dispute: what Medicaid data CMS can hand over to immigration enforcement, and whether officials have stayed inside the lines a judge drew.

What the Court Actually Allowed

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria, an Obama appointee, ruled in December that CMS could share specific Medicaid details, home addresses, dates of birth, and immigration status of immigrants without lawful status from the states involved in the lawsuit. That was a real ruling permitting real data sharing. This is not a story about ICE breaking a total prohibition. It's a story about ICE and CMS blowing past the boundaries of a court order that already authorized narrower sharing.

By late May, Chhabria had paused CMS-to-ICE data sharing for enforcement purposes after federal officials admitted CMS shared data in January that went further than the order allowed. One dataset covering refugees in Minnesota included U.S. citizens. A separate file transferred January 7 contained data on millions of people, including some in the country legally. None of those people were supposed to have their information handed to immigration enforcement under Chhabria's ruling.

ICE was ordered to delete the improperly shared data. Chhabria scheduled an August hearing to nail down which categories of noncitizen data can legally flow to ICE going forward, an indication the original order left real ambiguity that both sides are now fighting over.

The New Admission

In a court filing last week, the Justice Department told the court CMS had inadvertently reshared the same January dataset, the one with millions of names, with ICE a second time. Officials said the mistake happened during a separate effort to share data from states that weren't part of the lawsuit.

Alberto Briseno, a section chief with ICE's Homeland Security Investigations, said in a declaration that ICE personnel deleted the file once they found it and that it was never used for law enforcement purposes.

But Briseno's declaration didn't stop there. A day after that deletion, ICE ran a broader search and found six users still had copies of the original January 7 dataset sitting on their systems. Briseno said he wasn't aware of any additional copies beyond those.

That detail is the crux of Thursday's filing from the Democratic attorneys general: this wasn't a one-time clerical error caught and fixed. It was mishandled data that kept turning up in more places, months after ICE was first ordered to get rid of it.

Where Palantir Fits In

Palantir's ELITE app is used by ICE agents to pull up addresses of noncitizens who may be subject to deportation. According to the attorneys general's filing, the improperly shared Medicaid data made its way into that system, meaning information CMS should never have transferred outside the bounds of the court's order ended up feeding a tool actively used to locate people.

What controls exist to keep data flagged as improperly obtained from being loaded into operational law enforcement software in the first place? Briseno's declaration doesn't say Palantir did anything wrong, or that Palantir knew the data was tainted. It says ICE gave Palantir data it wasn't supposed to have.

The Legitimate Case for Data Sharing, and Where This Falls Short of It

There's a real argument for letting immigration enforcement access some government data to find people who are in the country illegally and subject to a final removal order. Judge Chhabria's own December ruling reflects that this isn't an inherently illegitimate use of Medicaid records. He authorized a version of it. Immigration enforcement is a legitimate government function, and Congress has never said Medicaid data is categorically off-limits to it.

But authorization within limits is different from what happened here. Citizens' data ending up in the mix, millions of records transferred at once, and copies persisting on six users' systems months after a deletion order isn't a policy disagreement. It's an operational failure at CMS and ICE, whichever administration is in office.

Judge Chhabria's August hearing is where this gets tested. He'll have to decide not just what categories of data ICE can access going forward, but what consequences, if any, follow from officials already blowing past his prior order twice. The Justice Department has not disputed the facts laid out in Briseno's declaration. It filed that declaration itself. What remains unresolved is whether the court views this as a fixable compliance problem or something that requires tighter guardrails before any further data sharing resumes.