Trump HHS Blocked From Providing Medicaid Data to ICE (2)

Trump administration health officials can no longer share people’s individual health data with the Department of Homeland Security for immigration enforcement purposes, a federal judge ruled Tuesday in an ongoing lawsuit brought by 20 states against the federal government.

DHS and the US Department of Health and Human Services are blocked from sharing Medicaid data from the plaintiff states for immigration purposes while the litigation plays out, Judge Vince Chhabria of the US District Court for the Northern District of California said in his order.

Chhabria’s preliminary injunction comes in a multistate lawsuit challenging the HHS’ sharing of health information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In June, the HHS transferred Medicaid data files with millions of people’s personal health records to Homeland Security.

In the order, Chhabria said that at least since 2013, ICE has had a policy that it didn’t use Medicaid agency data for immigration enforcement. That, however, changed when the Trump administration appeared “to have granted ICE unfettered access to all information about all Medicaid patients in the United States, whether citizens or noncitizens,” the judge said.

Such a move called for “the agencies to carry out a reasoned decisionmaking process” ahead of time, he said.

“The record in this case strongly suggests that no such process occurred,” Chhabria said. He also said that “HHS and DHS likely must go back and engage in a reasoned decisionmaking process before adopting and implementing such a significant change.”

An HHS spokesperson referred Bloomberg Law to a prior statement on the issue.

In that statement, the HHS said it “acted entirely within its legal authority—and in full compliance with all applicable laws—to ensure that Medicaid benefits are reserved for individuals who are lawfully entitled to receive them.”

DHS assistant secretary for public affairs Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that the “information sharing is essential to identify who is in our country, including violent criminals, determine what public safety and terror threats may exist so we can neutralize them, scrub these individuals from voter rolls, and identify what public benefits these aliens are using at taxpayer expense.”

“This lawsuit is yet another example of sanctuary states—like California—putting illegal aliens over protecting American communities,” McLaughlin said.

The order also comes as the HHS is taking a heavier hand with immigration issues. In July, the nation’s top health office announced it was restricting undocumented immigrant access to Head Start and other federal programs.

The plaintiff states—which include California, Arizona, Delaware, Illinois and Maine—weren’t entirely victorious in their injunction effort.

Chhabria denied their request to force the Trump administration to undergo notice-and-comment rulemaking before making a decision on such a policy shift.

The case is California v. HHS, N.D. Cal., No. 3:25-cv-05536, order 8/12/25.