Trump administration including immigration officials and the DOGE team are looking for sensitive Medicare database as part of their immigration crackdown, a Washington Post article said citing a person familiar with the matter.
The Medicare database, which is run by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), holds a lot of personal medical information. The Washington Post article said that the US immigration officials have been looking for addresses from this database.
Current and former health officials say they are very concerned because using this database for immigration enforcement seems unusual, and they’re not sure if it’s even legal, the Post said.
The requests to CMS came over the past month from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and involved Elon Musk’s DOGE team. This team has been trying to get access to many sensitive government data systems, according to the person and records, the article said.
ICE is working to locate certain immigrants who the Trump administration believes are in the country illegally.
To help with this, ICE, along with DOGE, asked CMS to check those immigrants’ Social Security Numbers in the Medicare system to find out their addresses.
As of early April, CMS was still deciding whether to approve this request. It’s not known if CMS has handed over the information yet. It’s also unclear how many immigrants ICE is looking for, or how useful the data would be—since Medicare usually doesn’t cover undocumented immigrants.