ICE agents stand guard outside an immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey, May 2026. Medicaid officials improperly turned over data on millions of people to ICE, which then shared the data with analytics firm Palantir, according to new court filings.
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After Medicaid officials improperly shared data on millions of people with immigration officials in January, ICE then shared the data with analytics firm Palantir, according to new court documents. Palantir operates the ELITE app, which is used by ICE agents to display the addresses of non-citizens who may be deported.
The revelation was made public in a motion filed Thursday by more than 20 Democratic attorneys general who sued the Trump administration last year over its data-sharing agreement between the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and ICE.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in California ruled in December that health officials can share with ICE some details from Medicaid data on immigrants without legal status from the states that filed the lawsuit, such as home addresses, dates of birth and immigration status.
Chhabria, an appointee of former President Obama, then temporarily suspended data sharing between CMS and ICE for immigration enforcement purposes in late May after federal officials acknowledged that CMS shared data with ICE in January that went beyond what the court order allowed. One set of data on refugees in Minnesota included U.S. citizens, and another, released Jan. 7, contained data on millions of people, including those in the country legally.
ICE should have deleted the incorrectly transferred data. Chhabria scheduled a hearing for August to clarify his order and clear up ambiguity about what categories of noncitizen data can legally be turned over to ICE.
But in recent days, federal officials have admitted to new cases of improper data sharing.
In a lawsuit last week, the Justice Department said CMS again inadvertently provided ICE with a dataset containing millions of names that CMS first improperly shared with ICE in January. The government said the error occurred while trying to share data from states not involved in the lawsuit.
Alberto Briseno, chief of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, wrote in a statement that ICE officials deleted the file after it was discovered and it was not used for law enforcement purposes.
Briseno then reported that a day later the agency conducted a broader search and found that a half-dozen users still had a copy of the Jan. 7 dataset.
In his latest statement, Briseno said he was not aware of any additional copies of the dataset, but noted that recent searches “highlighted the technological difficulties associated with creating the impression that all possible variations of a file have been searched and discovered.” He added: “ICE will continue to remove in good faith any copies that may be found in the future.”
Meanwhile, the Justice Department is asking the judge to expand his order to allow ICE to obtain data on a broader category of noncitizens—potentially including all immigrants who are not lawful permanent residents, citizens, or have another form of permanent status.
“ICE’s failure to identify the Medicaid records it holds undermines any assertion that the agency should be entitled to greater access to these data,” the Democratic attorneys general wrote in their motion filed late Thursday.
Their motion further stated: “Each successive disclosure of a violation of the Order makes it more difficult for Plaintiff States to have confidence in Defendants’ ability to maintain and protect these data in accordance with the Order, and makes it more difficult for Plaintiff States to convey assurances to Medicaid providers, enrollees (and their attorneys), and the general public regarding the confidentiality and confidentiality of their medical data.”
Palantir did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether the company removed the Jan. 7 data set shared by ICE after incorrectly receiving it from CMS. DHS also did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the data transfer to Palantir.
According to a motion filed by California Deputy Attorney General Anna Rich, when the plaintiffs asked what federal officials did to ensure that Palantir and other contractors deleted the data, the defendants responded that the data was transmitted through a Microsoft Teams chat and shared data was deleted from the chat. In her statement, Rich shared a document discovered by federal officials that shows a redacted transcript of what appears to be ICE officials asking Palantir to delete the file.
At the April 30 hearing, Chhabria warned that the federal government could not continue to use Medicaid data for deportation purposes if it continued to improperly share data from citizens and legal immigrants.
“If the federal government can’t be careful enough, it won’t be able to use this information, okay?” Chhabria said.