Immigration and Customs Enforcement is quietly gaining access to one of the most sensitive datasets in American life: the health records of low income patients in Medicaid. With help from Palantir’s analytics platforms, that information is being turned into a map of addresses, family ties, and potential deportation targets. The result is a collision between a public insurance program built on trust and a deportation machine built on data.
At the center of the controversy is a new data sharing pipeline between federal health officials and immigration agents, and a suite of Palantir tools designed to ingest and mine that information. What began as a back end agreement between agencies is rapidly reshaping the risks that immigrant families face when they sign up for basic medical care.
The new Medicaid data pipeline to ICE
The starting point for this shift is a formal arrangement that allows Medicaid enrollee information to flow from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to immigration authorities. The agency that oversees Medicaid, accessible through federal health portals, historically treated enrollee data as protected information tied to care and program integrity, not immigration enforcement. Under President Donald Trump, that firewall has been weakened, with officials explicitly authorizing data sharing so that immigration agents can identify “removable aliens in the United States,” according to a detailed analysis of the new Medicaid agreement.
Policy experts describe this as a sharp departure from past practice, because Medicaid is supposed to cover people with low incomes, not serve as a locator service for immigration raids. The new arrangement means that addresses, household composition, and eligibility records that families provide to qualify for coverage can now be repurposed for enforcement. That shift is not abstract. Reporting has already documented how Immigration and Customs agents are using Medicaid data to find out where immigrants live, turning a safety net program into a targeting tool.
Palantir ELITE and the rise of Medicaid surveillance
Into this newly opened data stream steps Palantir, the Silicon Valley company that has long sold its software to security agencies. Human rights advocates report that Palantir is alleged to have created a tool called ELITE for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, with the explicit purpose of helping ICE verify addresses and identify targets by fusing government datasets. The description of ELITE makes clear that it is designed to ingest exactly the kind of personal information that Medicaid now supplies, turning raw records into actionable leads for field agents.
Privacy advocates warn that this is not a hypothetical risk. A detailed investigation into Medicaid Surveillance describes how ICE is already using Palantir ELITE to mine Medicaid data, framing the practice as a “Privacy Crisis” for immigrant communities. According to that reporting, a federal judge in California has ruled that ICE can access certain Medicaid information and that it may be used for law enforcement, a decision that effectively greenlights the integration of health data into Palantir’s analytics stack. A companion analysis of the same case notes that the judge’s January ruling carved out space for this access despite arguments about the Privacy Act, the Social Security Act, and HIPAA protections, underscoring how the court weighed those laws against the government’s enforcement claims in California litigation.
ImmigrationOS, AI, and a $30 million surveillance buildout
Palantir’s work for ICE is not limited to ELITE. The company is also building a broader artificial intelligence platform called ImmigrationOS that is intended to knit together multiple data sources, including health and benefits records, into a single operating picture for immigration enforcement. According to a detailed contract summary, Palantir was granted $30 million to build this ImmigrationOS surveillance platform for ICE, with the original date announced in April 2025 and the project framed as a major expansion of the agency’s digital infrastructure.
Separate reporting on the same initiative notes that in Aug Palantir was slated to deliver a prototype of the ImmigrationOS platform by late September 2025, under a contract that runs through subsequent years and is structured around iterative research and development. The description of ImmigrationOS emphasizes that it is an AI system designed to help U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement track immigrants by aggregating data from across government, with Palantir providing the tools, not the rules. In practice, that means the same pipeline that feeds Medicaid records into ELITE can be folded into a larger ecosystem of predictive analytics, risk scores, and automated alerts.
Court fights, civil liberties, and the Trump deportation agenda
The legal and political backdrop to this data buildout is a series of court fights over whether the federal government can use Medicaid information to identify and deport immigrants. Civil liberties lawyers at EFF have described how, over the summer, they asked a federal judge to block the government from using Medicaid data in this way, arguing that the practice violates privacy protections and chills access to care. Their account of the case explains that ICE is drawing on Medicaid alongside other government databases to feed a Palantir tool that helps enforcement agents locate people, a pattern detailed in an in depth EFF report.
Those arguments ran into a judiciary that has been receptive to the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. In a video briefing, journalist Sarah Jenkins describes how a federal judge issued a partial legal victory for the administration, ruling that Immigration authorities could access some Medicaid information for deportation purposes, a decision that she characterizes as advancing President Trump’s broader strategy in Immigration litigation. A separate news clip on the same case notes that this ruling was framed as a partial victory for the Trump administration and its mass deportation agenda, with the court confirming that ICE can access some Medicaid information for deportation, as summarized in a short briefing. Together, these decisions have created the legal space that Palantir’s tools now occupy.
On the ground: families, front line agents, and a growing backlash
For immigrant families, the abstraction of “data sharing” translates into a concrete fear that a doctor’s visit could lead to a knock on the door. Reporting on how ICE is using Medicaid data to find out where immigrants live describes agents arriving at homes after cross referencing addresses from health records, with parents who enrolled their children in coverage suddenly facing enforcement at the same locations. That account, by reporter Anna Claire Vollers, underscores that Medicaid covers people with low incomes and that the program’s reach into mixed status households makes it a powerful targeting tool for ICE agents.
Online discussions show how quickly this reality has filtered into public debate. In one widely shared thread, a commenter insists that “Illegal immigrants can’t get medicaid,” only to be corrected by another user who points out that their children can, and that those children’s records can have immigration enforcement usage. The exchange captures a growing awareness that even when adults are ineligible, enrolling a citizen child can still expose a household to risk, a point spelled out in the online debate around Palantir’s role.
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