ICE shares Medicaid data with Palantir after improper CMS transfer

In January, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) transferred Medicaid records of millions of individuals—both citizens and legal residents—to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in violation of a court order. ICE subsequently provided portions of that data to the analytics firm Palantir, which uses the information in its ELITE application to locate non‑citizens slated for deportation. The breach was disclosed in filings by more than 20 Democratic attorneys general and a U.S. District Judge, Vince Chhabria, who had earlier ordered a pause on such data sharing. ICE officials later deleted the file, but a search uncovered that a handful of users still retained copies. The Justice Department admitted that CMS unintentionally reshared the dataset again. Palantir has said the data has been purged.