WA sues Trump administration for sharing personal health data with ICE

Washington has joined a multistate lawsuit to try to stop the Trump administration from sharing personal health data on Medicaid enrollees with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in federal court in Northern California, accuses the Department of Health and Human Services of illegally sharing a massive dataset of personal health information for millions of people with immigration officials in an effort to make it easier to locate people for deportation.

The data shared includes names, addresses and phone numbers for everyone enrolled in Medicaid.

Millions of individuals’ health information was transferred without their consent, and in violation of federal law,” the lawsuit, filed by Washington and 19 other states, says. “In doing so, the Trump administration silently destroyed longstanding guardrails that protected the public’s sensitive health data and restricted its use only for purposes that Congress has authorized.”

In the 70 years since Medicaid was established, the lawsuit says, federal law, policy and practice have dictated that personal health data is confidential and can be shared only narrowly for public health purposes and to administer the program itself.

The lawsuit seeks to stop any further transfer of data and to block its use for immigration enforcement purposes.

“If members of our community cannot trust that the government will keep their medical history and other personal data safe, they will think twice about going to the doctor when needed,” the lawsuit says.

The data sharing is just the latest example of the Trump administration sharing and amassing private information that previously had been kept only by individual agencies. The Department of Government Efficiency has gained access to Social Security data. Immigration officials have gained access to IRS data.

States, Washington included, say they only learned of the most recent data transfer from media reports.

The dataset included information from Washington and other states that allow non-U.S. citizens to enroll in Medicaid to pay for their care with state rather than federal dollars.

“Washington residents expect that the confidential information they give to the government to access medical treatment will only be used for healthcare purposes,” Washington Attorney General Nick Brown said in a prepared statement.

Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson called the sharing of data with ICE “outrageous.”

“This is a violation of trust for everyone whose data was inappropriately shared, but especially our immigrant communities and mixed-status families, who are already being targeted by the Trump Administration,” Ferguson said in a prepared statement.

Apple Health, as Medicaid is known in Washington, provides health insurance for more than 1.9 million people in the state. That includes a new program called Apple Health Expansion, which gives health insurance to low-income Washington residents regardless of their immigration status.

The lawsuit says that on March 31, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services sent the Washington Health Care Authority an email asking for information to confirm the state was not receiving federal funds unlawfully for noncitizens.

“This request was represented to Washington HCA as a routine audit,” the lawsuit says. “Nothing in the request indicated that CMS would share this information outside of HHS.”

But in June, the state learned from an Associated Press article that CMS had “apparently and improperly” transferred the data to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE.

The lawsuit comes as the U.S. Senate on Tuesday passed President Donald Trump’s sweeping bill of tax and spending cuts, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted could result in the loss of Medicaid coverage for nearly 12 million people.

State officials are required to share certain Medicaid data with the federal government to secure federal funding and administer the program. But they’ve also shared information on everyone in Apple Health Expansion, including classifying almost all enrollees as noncitizens.

State officials have been cagey about whether they shared more Medicaid information than they were required to.

The state Health Care Authority prepared an FAQ document in response to the media reports that the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had shared data with ICE.

“Did HCA share information with CMS they weren’t required to submit for people enrolled in Apple Health Expansion?” the FAQ asks.

The answer is not a clear yes or a clear no.

The federal government has long paid for emergency Medicaid visits for all people regardless of immigration status, and information about ER visits by Apple Health Expansion enrollees must be submitted to the federal government.

But the state has also shared information about nonemergency medical visits for noncitizens enrolled in Apple Health Expansion.

“This information was not necessary to share, the Health Care Authority wrote, adding that it stopped sharing the non-emergency information when it learned in April that the information was being shared with immigration officials.