In an unprecedented move, the Associated Press has confirmed that the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has turned over Medicaid enrollment data to ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

At 11:34 AM eastern time on Thursday, July 17, the AP’s Kimberly Kindy and Amanda Seitz filed their report. “Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials will be given access to the personal data of the nation’s 79 million Medicaid enrollees, including home addresses and ethnicities, to track down immigrants who may not be living legally in the United States, according to an agreement obtained by The Associated Press,” Kindy and Seitz wrote.

“The information will give ICE officials the ability to find ‘the location of aliens’ across the country, says the agreement signed Monday between the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Department of Homeland Security. The agreement has not been announced publicly,” they reported.

As they noted, “The extraordinary disclosure of millions of such personal health data to deportation officials is the latest escalation in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, which has repeatedly tested legal boundaries in its effort to arrest 3,000 people daily. Lawmakers and some CMS officials have challenged the legality of deportation officials’ access to some states’ Medicaid enrollee data. It’s a move, first reported by the AP last month, that Health and Human Services officials said was aimed at rooting out people enrolled in the program improperly. But the latest data-sharing agreement makes clear what ICE officials intend to do with the health data.” In fact, “ICE will use the CMS data to allow ICE to receive identity and location information on aliens identified by ICE,” the agreement says.

As the AP reporters noted, “Such disclosures, even if not acted upon, could cause widespread alarm among people seeking emergency medical help for themselves or their children. Other efforts to crack down on illegal immigration have made schools, churches, courthouses and other everyday places feel perilous to immigrants and even U.S. citizens who fear getting caught up in a raid.”

And, they added, “HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon would not respond to the latest agreement. It is unclear, though, whether Homeland Security has yet accessed the information. The department’s assistant secretary, Tricia McLaughlin, said in an emailed statement that the two agencies ‘are exploring an initiative to ensure that illegal aliens are not receiving Medicaid benefits that are meant for law-abiding Americans.’”

An immediate reaction to the move came from the Center for Democracy & Technology, a non-partisan, non-profit organization focused on digital rights, whose director of equity in civic technology, Elizabeth Laird, released a statement on Thursday afternoon. “By turning over some of our most sensitive healthcare data to ICE, Health and Human Services has fundamentally betrayed the trust of almost 80 million people,” Laird stated. “This jaw-dropping development proves that the Administration’s claim of using this information to prevent fraud is a Trojan horse that instead will primarily advance their goal of deporting millions of people. Over 90 percent of entitlement fraud is committed by U.S. citizens, underscoring the false pretense of sharing this information with ICE. The results of this decision will be devastating. It will sink trust in government even lower, force individuals to choose between life-saving care and turning over data to immigration authorities, and erode the quality and effectiveness of government services.”

This is a developing story. Healthcare Innovation will update its readers as new developments emerge.