Latest news with #AdministrativeProceduresAct
The Hill
02-07-2025
- Health
- The Hill
20 states sue over Medicaid data release to ICE officials
A coalition of 20 Democrat-led states is suing the Trump administration for sharing Medicaid data with immigration officials, arguing it violates privacy protections. The suit, spearheaded by Californian and filed Tuesday, argues the Trump administration violated the law in sharing data with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that had nothing to do with administering the health care program. 'The Trump Administration has upended longstanding privacy protections with its decision to illegally share sensitive, personal health data with ICE. In doing so, it has created a culture of fear that will lead to fewer people seeking vital emergency medical care,' said California Attorney General Rob Bonta. 'I'm sickened by this latest salvo in the President's anti-immigrant campaign. We're headed to court to prevent any further sharing of Medicaid data — and to ensure any of the data that's already been shared is not used for immigration enforcement purposes.' The states argue that failure to notify them of data sharing plans violates the Administrative Procedures Act as well as the Social Security Act; the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA; the Federal Information Security Modernization Act and the Privacy Act. The data transfer, first reported by The Associated Press last month, showed that Medicaid officials unsuccessfully sought to block the data transfer, citing legal and ethical concerns. Nevertheless, two top advisers to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ordered the dataset handed over to the Department of Homeland Security, the emails show. Officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services were given just 54 minutes on Tuesday to comply with the directive. The dataset includes the information of people living in California, Illinois, Washington state and Washington, D.C., all of which allow non-U.S. citizens to enroll in Medicaid programs that pay for their expenses using only state taxpayer dollars. The move comes as the Trump administration has used a number of moves to target migrants, including those with lawful status in the U.S. ICE agents have been conducting arrests of migrants after those in immigration court leave hearings, prompting critiques from Democrats that the Trump administration is targeting those seeking to immigrate through lawful pathways. The Trump administration has sought to tap a number of databases to gain information about migrants, including IRS data. —The Associated Press contributed.
27-06-2025
- Politics
What next for birthright citizenship after Supreme Court limits nationwide injunctions
The Supreme Court on Friday handed down a highly-anticipated ruling involving President Donald Trump's Day 1 executive order to effectively end birthright citizenship. But many questions remain about how such an order would be carried out on a practical level. And while the court's conservative majority limited nationwide injunctions issued by federal judges against the order, the court did not rule on whether the order itself is constitutional. Still, the decision could lead to a radical reshaping of a legal right to citizenship that's been long guaranteed by the 14th Amendment -- at least in the short term. Effective immediately, the administration can begin planning for how it would implement an end to birthright citizenship. Trump's order itself has a 30-day grace period before taking effect, meaning right now there is no change to birthright citizenship and children born everywhere in the country are still U.S. citizens. Regulations will need to be drafted and specifics of such an order still need to be addressed: for example, will every pregnant woman in America now need to go to the hospital with a passport or birth certificate? The White House on Friday had no clear answers when pressed for specifics. Federal district courts in Maryland, Massachusetts and New Hampshire will soon have to revisit nationwide injunctions issued there in light of the court's decision and tailor or narrow them to apply only to the plaintiffs who brought these cases. The plaintiffs were 22 states, immigrant advocacy groups and a number of pregnant noncitizen women. Challengers to Trump's executive order will continue to litigate the order on the merits. No court has directly considered the constitutionality of the executive order, though three lower courts have said it would appear to plainly violate the 14th Amendment and there are three longstanding Supreme Court precedents unambiguously upholding birthright citizenship. But for the remaining 28 states that have not sued, Trump's attempts to end birthright citizenship could go into effect in as soon as 30 days. Challengers can and will also fight broad implementation in other ways as it moves forward. On Friday, one group filed a class action lawsuit seeking broad protection of all noncitizen pregnant women, even those who are not plaintiffs. In a concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh indicated plaintiffs might also be able to challenge the administration's citizenship regulations, once issued, under the Administrative Procedures Act. Attorney General Pam Bondi, though, struggled on Friday to address how exactly administration is planning to implement Trump's order. Asked who would be tasked with vetting citizenship (for example, whether it would be nurses or doctors as babies are being born) Bondi only responded: "This is all pending litigation." Another reporter asked Bondi, "If you have an undocumented baby, would that baby then be an enforcement priority?" "The violent criminals in our country are the priority," Bondi deflected. What's next for nationwide injunctions? More broadly, the administration will likely seek to roll back nationwide injunctions blocking Trump policies in other cases. Those hearings and decisions will play out in the coming weeks. "These injunctions have blocked our policies from tariffs to military readiness to immigration to foreign affairs, fraud, abuse and many other issues," Bondi said on Friday. "The judges have tried to seize the executive branch's power and they cannot do that. No longer." President Trump said similarly as he celebrated the ruling. "So, thanks to this decision, we can now promptly filed to proceed with these numerous policies and those that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis, including birthright citizenship, ending sanctuary city funding, suspending refugee resettlement, freezing unnecessary funding, stopping federal taxpayers from paying for transgender surgeries and numerous other priorities of the American people," the president said.
Boston Globe
27-06-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Supreme Court curbs injunctions but other ‘pathways' remain to defend birthright citizenship, legal experts say
The ruling 'does not address the merits of the Trump administration's unprecedented claims regarding who is entitled to birthright citizenship,' he said. 'At the very outset of the opinion, the [majority] court makes clear that its decision is about scope of relief. It does not touch on the merits of the argument. On that score, every federal court that has decided this issue going back 150, years and more, has made clear that any child born in the United States is a United States citizen.' He added: 'Nothing in today's Supreme Court ruling does anything to disturb that. So that's the one important takeaway from this decision.' Advertisement Lawyers for Civil Rights filed a lawsuit Jan. 21 seeking to block Trump's order on behalf of two expectant mothers and two nonprofit groups, A second suit Advertisement Two cities, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., joined the states in the suit. US District Court Judge Leo Sorokin issued an universal injunction in response to the lawsuits. But that ruling by Sorokin was invalidated by the Supreme Court decision on Friday. In a statement Friday, Campbell decried the majority ruling in the birthright case. 'I am proud to defend birthright citizenship and the rights of those born in the United States, which are guaranteed by the 14th Amendment,' Campbell, a Democrat, said in a statement. She said she's 'confident our case will be successful, and the President's blatantly unconstitutional executive order will ultimately be struck down.' While Friday's ruling is disappointing, Campbell said, 'we look forward to demonstrating why nationwide relief in this case is necessary, as the court has invited us to do. We will once again demonstrate what this country has known to be true since the Civil War: citizenship should not, cannot, and must not depend on the state where a baby was born.' Sellstrom said the majority's decision has potentially beneficial impacts for LCR's clients and others likely to be impacted by the Trump administration's argument that birthright citizenship is not a constitutional right enjoyed by anyone born in the US. In one footnote, he said, the majority explicitly wrote that the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) which allows judges to strike down executive actions, is not impacted by the decision on universal injunctions. Sellstrom said LCR's challenge to the administration's executive order included a claim under the APA and that remains an active part of the lawsuit pending before US District Court Judge Leo Sorokin. (The majority did knock down Sorokin's universal injunction.) Advertisement He also stressed that class action lawsuits remain a viable alternative to universal injunctions. A class action benefits all, even those noted named plaintiffs, he said. 'It certainly makes it more difficult to have the birthright citizenship principle that the Trump administration wants to put forth taken down universally and quickly,' Sellstrom said. 'But what it does on the procedural level is it leaves open multiple pathways to achieve the same result of a universal injunction, but via different means.' He said LCR is reaching out to its clients and is reviewing, in detail, the Supreme Court ruling before deciding their next steps. But, he was certain LCR will continue to challenge the administration's targeting of birthright citizenship. 'Today's Supreme Court decision certainly makes that more difficult, but again, there are multiple pathways to achieve that same vindication,' he said. 'It will just take a different pathway than the one that we have drawn so far.' In February, Sorokin released a 31-page ruling issuing the nationwide preliminary injunction that had been sought by attorneys general from Massachusetts and 17 other states and immigration advocates. In the ruling, Sorokin wrote that his decision 'is based on straightforward application of settled Supreme Court precedent reiterated and reaffirmed in various ways for more than a century by all three branches of the federal government.' He noted that the 'loss of birthright citizenship — even if temporary, and later restored at the conclusion of litigation — has cascading effects that would cut across a young child's life (and the life of that child's family), very likely leaving permanent scars.' The court's failure to resolve whether birthright citizenship remains a valid constitutional right will cause 'chaos' for millions of people, especially for parents whose children are born after the administration issued its executive order, Daniel Kanstroom, a Boston College Law School immigration law expert. Advertisement He said that by focusing its attention to the issue of universal injunctions alone, the Supreme Court's majority has created massive uncertainty for families, for lawyers, for federal judges, for immigration law judges that will take years to untangle. 'I think that that was possibly the worst imaginable case the court could have chosen to deal with the problem of universal injunctions,' he said in a telephone interview Friday. 'It's going to be a huge mess. It's going to cause tremendous fear and uncertainty, probably for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.' He said the administration's executive order applies to any child born after this February. But that deadline and the order itself does not provide any specifics on who will be impacted – is it just the child born of a mother unlawfully present but where the father is unknown and possibly a citizen, for example, he said. 'You have all kinds of situations, but all these people are now in a precarious moment in terms of the citizenship of their children. And that's particularly problematic because if you have children who are living here and saw they were citizens, and now are not sure,' he said. 'All these people are now in a precarious moment in terms of the citizenship of their children.' He said the issue decided by the court - universal injunctions - is a valid legal issue. But by intertwining it with the 14th Amendment, the majority missed a major opportunity to protect constitutional rights. Advertisement 'It's hard to understand how the Supreme Court is really doing its job,' he said. 'What's going to be created now is just chaos and fear and a staggering amount of work for the district courts.' This is a developing story and will be updated. Information from earlier Globe reporting was used in this account. John R. Ellement can be reached at
Yahoo
24-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
CFPB medical debt rule weighed
This story was originally published on Payments Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Payments Dive newsletter. A federal judge can now weigh additional arguments challenging the legality of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rule that would prevent medical debt from being factored into consumers' credit reports, following the filing of more briefs in the federal case last week. U.S. District Judge Sean Jordan requested the briefs be filed by last Friday for the lawsuit filed in January in Texas by two trade associations for credit unions and credit bureaus. The CFPB has stopped defending the rule, and last month Jordan allowed the National Consumer Law Center to intervene and defend the rule. Jordan is expected to rule on the matter by Aug. 11, the date his most recent stay of the CFPB's medical debt rule expires. In April, the bureau asked Jordan to issue a consent judgment for plaintiffs and vacate the rule. The Biden-era CFPB, under former Director Rohit Chopra, said that the rule would erase $49 billion in medical debt from credit reports for about 15 million people. The bureau had estimated that the rule would lead to 22,000 additional mortgages annually, and that consumers with medical debt could see their credit scores increase by 20 points, on average. Scores from the credit-reporting agencies directly affect consumers' access to credit and borrowing costs across an array of products, from credit cards to auto loans, mortgages and the interest rates lenders assess. Following a June 11 hearing, Jordan sought additional legal briefs from the plaintiffs and CFPB, as well as the NCLC, which represents Harvey Coleman, a District of Columbia resident, and David Deeds, a truck driver in Texas. Coleman incurred a $1,300 debt for his son's medical emergency, while Deeds was unable to pay a $60,000 bill for surgery last year to treat his pancreatic cancer, according to the law center's motion to intervene. Jordan, who presides in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, requested the parties' briefs on the legal implications of the intervening defendants' refusal to consent to the judgment the bureau and plaintiffs want, and on the court vacating the rule. The lawsuit was filed in January by the Consumer Data Industry Association, which represents credit-reporting agencies, and the Cornerstone Credit Union League, the trade association for about 600 credit unions in Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas. The bureau's effort to win a consent judgment to repeal the medical debt rule 'is contrary to its responsibilities to engage in notice-and-comment rulemaking under the Administrative Procedures Act,' the law center wrote in its brief June 16. 'The CFPB's about-face both fails to follow the proscribed procedures set forth in the statutes and is arbitrary and capricious because it is unsupported by adequate reasoning.' Several parts of the rule are unaffected by the arguments in the case, which leaves the court unable to vacate the entire rule, the intervenors also argued. 'Nothing in Intervenors' discussion of statutory history changes the fact that the Medical Debt Rule violates the plain terms of the statute,' the plaintiffs responded Friday in their brief, urging Jordan to either adopt the proposed consent order with the CFPB and vacate the rule or to grant plaintiffs summary judgment. Many of the arguments in the broader case center around whether the Fair Credit Reporting Act prohibits the use of consumers' medical debt information. The rule, enacted in January by the Biden administration, 'upends the statute's careful balancing of consumers' privacy interests with the benefits of well-informed credit underwriting,' the bureau said in a May 30 legal brief asking the court to vacate the rule. A regulation to implement a statute 'cannot lawfully contradict that statute, and the Rule cannot prohibit activities' that the FCRA authorizes, the CFPB said. In 2023, the three major credit reporting bureaus – Experian, Equifax and TransUnion – said they had removed medical debts less than $500 from consumers' credit reports. The CFPB's decision on the medical debt rule is the latest in a series of cases that the bureau has declined to defend under Acting Director Russell Vought, who has sought to narrow the agency's scope and dramatically reduce its staffing. 'Information about unpaid medical debts is an important element in assessing a consumer's ability to pay,' Dan Smith, the CDIA's president and chief executive, said in a May 1 statement welcoming the CFPB's decision not to defend the rule. 'This is the right outcome for protecting the integrity of that system. The CFPB had argued previously that unpaid medical bills provide lenders 'little predictive value' about a borrower's ability to repay other debts. Recommended Reading Biden administration seeks to erase medical debt from credit reports Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Judge determined OPM broke law with DOGE access to data
A federal judge granted an injunction blocking the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from accessing databases at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). The decision from U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote, a Clinton appointee, found DOGE was unlawfully given access to sweeping databases that cover current and former federal employees and also contain information on prospective hires. 'Following President Trump's inauguration, OPM granted broad access to many of those systems to a group of individuals associated with the Department of Government Efficiency ('DOGE'), even though no credible need for this access had been demonstrated. In doing so, OPM violated the law and bypassed its established cybersecurity practices,' Cote wrote. DOGE was given access to OPM data in the earliest days of the administration as the Trump team looked for ways to contact every federal employee — a task that was otherwise handled through each individual department or agency. That access was a steppingstone to later emailing employees to offer a government buyout and later to demand employees send weekly emails listing five accomplishments achieved. Cote determined that OPM violated the privacy act by giving DOGE access to the files and never showed a clear need to access the data. 'The plaintiffs have pointed to clear evidence that the DOGE agents did not need access to the records disclosed to them, much less the administrative access that they were given,' she wrote, noting that once DOGE was given access to the system, 'database administrators who were responsible for the normal functioning of those systems had their access revoked.' Cote also said DOGE's access violated the Administrative Procedures Act prohibition on arbitrary and capricious government actions. While Cote's decision enjoins DOGE access to the OPM system, the parties will meet Thursday to hammer out the details of the injunction. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
