A California federal judge has blocked Trump administration health officials from sharing people’s individual health data with the Department of Homeland Security for immigration enforcement purposes while litigation plays out, Bloomberg reported Aug. 12.
California and 19 other states filed a federal lawsuit July 1 against HHS alleging CMS transferred protected health information from state Medicaid programs to the Department of Homeland Security without patient consent, public notice or legal justification.
According to the lawsuit, CMS gave the Department of Homeland Security access to identifiable data from millions of Medicaid enrollees, including residents in California, Illinois and Washington. The plaintiffs argue the data sharing violates the Administrative Procedure Act, the Privacy Act of 1974 and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. The complaint cites reports that a federal data aggregation initiative may be using this information to build a searchable database to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In his Aug. 12 order, Northern District of California Judge Vince Chhabria said that since at least 2013, ICE has had a policy that it didn’t use Medicaid data from immigration enforcement, according to the report.
That changed when the Trump administration appeared to have “granted ICE unfettered access to all information about all Medicaid patients in the United States, whether citizens or noncitizens,” Mr. Chhabria said in his ruling. That move calls for the agencies to “carry out a reasoned decisionmaking process” ahead of time. He said the record “strongly suggests that no such process occurred.”
The judge said that HHS and the Department of Homeland Security “likely must go back and engage in a reasoned decisionmaking process before adopting and implementing such a significant change.”
HHS referred Bloomberg to a previous statement that said it “acted entirely within its legal authority—and in full compliance with all applicable laws—to ensure that Medicaid benefits are reserved for individuals who are lawfully entitled to receive them.”
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