The U.S. health department is giving Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials access to the personal data of 79 million Medicaid enrollees to help them track down immigrants who may not be living legally in the country, it said on Thursday.
Giving ICE access to the personal data of Medicaid enrollees marks an escalation in President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies. It may also raise privacy concerns under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPAA.
Immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally are not eligible for Medicaid under federal law, but 14 states and the District of Columbia provide coverage for eligible children regardless of immigration status, and seven states and DC do so for adults.
The most highly funded police force to ever exist now knows I’m trans. Not that I’m not public about this fact, but sits different when you’re in a searchable dataset accessable to law enforcement.
This also gives them a pretty solid idea of who is disabled.
And with the lack of civil rights in the deportation process, all ICE has to do is accuse you of being foreign and being in the US illegally. Bonus, ICE gets to decide on their own if your case requires judicial review or not, meaning you can be deported to CECOT before anyone even knows what happened to you.
And the public will support it, because they’re being told that trans people are horrible criminals and disabled people are a drain on society. I know this because those are the same reasons they already give for their treatment of immigrants.
The legislative and judicial branches are already cut out of this process, the only thing the executive branch is waiting for is when they feel it’s the right time.