In May 2026, ICE agents were stationed outside an immigrant detention center in Newark, New Jersey. Recent court filings have revealed that Medicaid officials improperly shared data on millions of individuals with ICE, who then passed this data to the analytics firm Palantir. This information surfaced from a lawsuit involving Democratic attorneys general who challenged the Trump administration’s data-sharing practices.
Palantir uses an application named ELITE that helps ICE agents identify noncitizen addresses for deportation purposes. This came to light in a motion filed by over 20 Democratic attorneys general, opposing the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) sharing data with ICE. In December, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria allowed health officials to share specific Medicaid details regarding immigrants without lawful status with ICE, such as addresses and birth dates, for states involved in the lawsuit.
However, Chhabria temporarily suspended this data sharing in late May after CMS admitted to exceeding court-allowed data sharing. A dataset meant for refugees included U.S. citizens, and another shared on January 7 contained millions of records, some of which were legal residents. ICE was instructed to delete such improperly shared data.
The confusion continued with CMS inadvertently resharing the expansive dataset in January. This happened during an attempt to share data from states not included in the lawsuit. ICE Homeland Security Investigations chief, Alberto Briseno, confirmed deletion of the file and stated it was not used for enforcement. Nonetheless, further searches revealed more copies within ICE systems.
In response to these breaches, the Department of Justice requested a broader data-sharing order, potentially including all non-legal permanent residents. However, Democratic attorneys general argue ICE’s current data mismanagement undermines the demand for expanded access. They raised concerns over data privacy assurances to Medicaid stakeholders.
Palantir has not commented on whether it deleted the problematic dataset. The Department of Homeland Security was also unavailable for comment regarding their data transmission to Palantir. According to California Deputy Attorney General Anna Rich, federal officials stated the data shared via Microsoft Teams had been deleted from the chat, confirmed by redacted transcripts from discovery documents.
During an April 30 hearing, Judge Chhabria cautioned that improper data sharing involving citizens and legal residents could lead to restrictions on using Medicaid data for deportations. He stated, “If the federal government cannot be sufficiently careful then it can’t use the information, ok?”