California sues Trump administration for sharing Medicaid data with ICE
The 78 million Americans receiving health care through Medicaid, including 15 million Californians in the Medi-Cal program, provide personal information that their states forward to the federal government to verify their eligibility. But California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the states learned last month that the administration has disclosed the private Medicaid files to the Department of Homeland Security to create a database for raids and deportations by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
'The Trump administration has upended longstanding privacy protections with its decision to illegally share sensitive, personal health data with ICE,' Bonta said in a statement announcing the lawsuit, filed in federal court in San Francisco. 'In doing so, it has created a culture of fear that will lead to fewer people seeking vital emergency medical care.'
He spoke hours after the Senate voted 51-50 to approve President Donald Trump's budget bill, which would remove nearly 12 million low-income recipients from Medicaid over the next decade and increase costs for others in the program while lowering taxes, mostly for those with high incomes.
The bill, sent to the House for a final vote, would also provide nearly $30 billion for ICE enforcement and deportation programs, three times the agency's current budget, and another $45 billion to build more immigration detention centers.
Before casting the tiebreaking vote in the Senate, Vice President JD Vance said on X Monday night that other provisions of the bill, including what he described as 'the minutiae of the Medicaid policy,' were 'immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.'
In the lawsuit, the states contend the disclosure to immigration officials of information about Medicaid recipients violated federal privacy laws and had not been authorized by Congress.
'The Trump administration silently destroyed longstanding guardrails that protected the public's sensitive health data,' the states' lawyers wrote. They asked a federal judge to halt any further transfers of patients' data and to prohibit immigration agencies from using the information to investigate, arrest or deport immigrants.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment. But Bonta said the Trump administration has argued, without any supporting evidence, that sharing information with DHS would help combat fraud and ensure that only eligible people were enrolled in Medicaid. And he said many Californians are not applying for needed benefits because they fear showing up at government offices.
Laws passed by Congress make low-income people eligible for the program 'regardless of immigration status,' the attorney general said. 'This isn't about cutting waste or going after fraud. This is about going after vulnerable people,' and 'states and private hospitals will be the ones to pay,' he said.
While states lack authority to regulate federal agencies, California lawmakers are making new efforts to prevent state agencies from aiding Trump's deportations.
In addition to the state's 2018 'sanctuary' law and similar laws in many cities and counties that prohibit local officers from keeping undocumented immigrants in custody so they can be turned over to federal agents, Assembly Bill 322 would prohibit private data brokers from selling information about their customers' location to anyone, including ICE.
'We're seeing ICE raids across the state and we're seeing mothers, fathers, children being kidnapped from the streets across California,' Assembly Member Liz Ortega, D-San Leandro, said at a news conference last week announcing the legislation. The lead author is Assembly Member Chris Ward, D-San Diego.
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