Trump Sends Medicaid Data To ICE, Turning This Service Into Another Weapon For His Racist ICE Goon Squads

Privacy

from the evil-so-thick-everyone-should-be-cutting-it-with-knives dept

Here we go. Again. Nonstop. The Racist Fucks Regime is at it again, leveraging every piece of data involuntarily collected by the government as a weapon to deploy against brown people.

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.

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.

I mean, you can see the cleansing from here. The Trump administration doesn’t actually care about Medicaid enrollees unless it can find some way to kick them off the service. The juice here is this: “home addresses and ethnicities.” No one actually believes the “worst of the worst” are also availing themselves of limited medical assistance offered by the US government, but there’s a slim possibility ICE might pick off a migrant or two by performing biased searches.

No, the only thing anyone given access to this data will be searching for is “ethnicity,” which means ICE and the DHS will be doing the sort of thing they’re not supposed to be doing under the Constitution: pretending being not-white is the same thing as reasonable suspicion. This point was made particularly (and almost insultingly) clear by a federal judge earlier this month:

[T]he Court considers whether speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent could give rise to reasonable suspicion. There is no case law that supports that it could.

In other words, assuming things about legal status simply because of English skills — or, in this case, ethnicity — is a non-starter constitutionally speaking. But with this new data-sharing agreement, no one has to ask a judge anything, especially if the government continues to ignore due process rights and fly people to whatever maximum security gulag will take them.

ICE/DHS are going to use this database — along with data pulled from the IRS and other federal agencies — to target people solely because of their surnames and/or ethnicity. And, as the AP report notes, this has not been announced publicly, which remains the case at the time of writing.

All that’s on the DHS website is some crowing about arresting 300,000 people since the beginning of this year, interspersed sparsely with a few narratives about “this one time we caught a really bad guy who was also an immigrant!” And all that means is that 99.9% of those 300,000 arrests were of regular, non-dangerous people who were doing little more than following the rules as well as they could while contributing to their workplaces, families, and communities.

Now, even more of those people are going to be ejected from this country by the hideous bigots currently in office. Giving ICE access to a database searchable by ethnicity guarantees that’s pretty much the only way it will be used. Knowing that, the minimal access restrictions placed on this database are meaningless. It just means ICE will have actualize its bigotry a bit more effectively.

The agreement does not allow ICE officials to download the data. Instead, they will be allowed to access it for a limited period from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, until Sept. 9.

Those restrictions might have meant something if there were a greater purpose than just giving ICE agents a search engine with a “-white” search modifier. If anyone actually cared at all about curbing ICE (and the Trump administration), there would be no option to search by ethnicity. Instead, immigration agents would only be able to run searches on names known to them — you know, actual criminal suspects or previously convicted people.

And, of course, it’s even stupider and evil-er than this end result. The original plan was to allow Trump to enact some sort of weird revenge on states he felt weren’t MAGA enough.

Trump officials last month demanded that the federal health agency’s staffers release personally identifiable information on millions of Medicaid enrollees from seven states that permit non-U.S. citizens to enroll in their full Medicaid programs.

The states launched these programs during the Biden administration and said they would not bill the federal government to cover the health care costs of those immigrants. All the states — California, New York, Washington, Oregon, Illinois, Minnesota and Colorado — have Democratic governors.

Unfortunately, even the stupidest evil is still dangerous. In fact, it might be worse than less-stupid evil, which may occasionally perform the sort of sanity checks even single-cell organisms are capable of carrying out. This is blunt force racism that can hardly even be bothered to pretend it’s serving a higher government purpose. ICE doesn’t need this data, something made obvious by the fact it has never utilized it before now. But now it has it and the only thing it can do with it is make things even worse than they already are.

Filed Under: bigotry, dhs, ice, mass deportation, racism, trump administration