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mass deportation
'Weaponization of Data': Trump Admin Gives ICE Personal Info of 79 Million Medicaid Recipients
"Trump said he would go after the 'worst of the worst' immigrants, yet now is giving ICE EVERYONE's Medicaid data, even as ICE targets U.S. citizens," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal.
Jul 17, 2025
The Trump administration is handing over the personal data of every Medicaid enrollee to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
According to The Associated Press Thursday, all 79 million people currently receiving the government health insurance benefit will have information shared with ICE by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS):
The database will reveal to ICE officials the names, addresses, birth dates, ethnic and racial information, as well as Social Security numbers for all people enrolled in Medicaid. The state and federally funded program provides healthcare coverage... for the poorest of people, including millions of children.
The "extraordinary" agreement was struck Monday with CMS and not meant to be publicized, according to the AP. The memo states that its intention is to help ICE find the "location of aliens" across the country.
As one unnamed CMS employee told the AP, "They are trying to turn us into immigration agents."
Republicans have often raised the specter of undocumented immigrants claiming benefits in order to justify cutting the government health insurance program.
However, undocumented immigrants are barred from receiving federally funded Medicaid coverage.
The only exception is emergency Medicaid, which covers lifesaving services and which the government requires to be extended to anyone who needs it regardless of status—though this makes up just 1% of overall Medicaid spending.
Some states have also expanded Medicaid to include noncitizens not covered by the federal program. However, that money comes from state budgets rather than the federal one.
Last month, President Donald Trump demanded that CMS hand over the personal data of the millions of Medicaid enrollees in the seven states that allow noncitizens to apply, a move that dozens of states sued to prevent.
At the time, the government justified it as a measure to simply root out fraud and abuse. But under Monday's agreement, the AP says, the Department of Homeland Security "will use the data to identify, for deportation purposes, people who [are] in the country illegally."
However, nearly everyone enrolled in Medicaid is either an American citizen or other legal resident.
Given that the president has made very clear his intent to begin denaturalizing and deporting American citizens, the handing of tens of millions of people's sensitive information to ICE is causing widespread alarm.
"Trump is letting ICE track Americans using their personal and private Medicaid health data. Undocumented immigrants aren't eligible to receive Medicaid, but other people they want to target and track are," said Melanie D'Arrigo, the executive director of the the Campaign for New York Health. "They're not going to stop at immigrants."
"The massive transfer of the personal data of millions of Medicaid recipients should alarm every American," Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) told the AP. "This massive violation of our privacy laws must be halted immediately. It will harm families across the nation and only cause more citizens to forego lifesaving access to healthcare."
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) wrote in a post on X that, "This is about the weaponization of data, full stop. Trump said he would go after the 'worst of the worst' immigrants, yet now is giving ICE EVERYONE's Medicaid data, even as ICE targets U.S. citizens."
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'This Is an Internment Camp': Lawmakers Horrified by Inhumane Conditions in 'Alligator Alcatraz'
"I saw 32 people per cage—about 6 cages in one tent. People were yelling, 'Help me, help me'," said Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost.
Jul 13, 2025
For the first time, Democratic lawmakers were allowed to tour U.S. President Donald Trump's sprawling Everglades immigrant detention center on Saturday. They said what they witnessed was "disturbing" and "disgusting."
After Democrats were previously denied entry to the facility known as "Alligator Alcatraz," three Democratic congresspeople from Florida—Reps. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Jared Moskowitz, and Maxwell Frost—journeyed to the remote compound along with another group of Republicans as part of a state-arranged tour.
"Alligator Alcatraz" was erected within a matter of weeks and now contains approximately 900 people who have been rounded up as part of Trump's "mass deportation" crusade, which a court determined was rife with illegal racial profiling.
The administration said they hope to fill the camp with as many as 5,000 people at a time.
Detainees have previously described heinous conditions to their attorneys, including worm and maggot-infested food, sweltering heat, and the denial of medication and showers for days at a time.
Though the Democrats who visited the facility were not allowed to speak with detainees or see their conditions up close, their descriptions of the facilities at a press conference following the visit paint an appalling picture.
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Wasserman-Schultz described it as an "internment camp" where detainees are "essentially packed into cages."
"Wall-to-wall humans. 32 detainees per cage," she said. This, she noted, is unusual for immigration facilities, like the nearby Krome detention center in Miami-Dade County, where detainees are allowed to roam freely between buildings.
"The only thing inside those cages are their bunk beds," she said. She later noted that in the unused dorm they toured there were already "bugs all over the mattresses that had not yet been used."
"There are three tiny toilet units that have a sink attached to it," she said. "They get their drinking water, and they brush their teeth where they poop, in the same unit," she continued.
Frost said the lawmakers asked to view the toilets currently in use by detainees, but were denied and instead showed ones in a currently unused part of the facility.
He brought up prior complaints made by prisoners of the camp about the sanitation.
"Some of the biggest complaints we've heard is, yes, there's three toilets, but a lot of the time, only one is working," he said. "They get backed up: Feces being spread everywhere."
Wasserman-Schultz said they also viewed a meal-prep area. While employees of the facility were given large, hearty portions, she says prisoners were fed a "small...gray turkey and cheese sandwich, an apple, and chips" that she said was far too small to sustain a fully-grown man.
Wasserman-Schultz also said she brought a thermostat to measure the temperature within the facility, which the Department of Homeland Security has claimed was "air conditioned." She said that the area just outside the tents that housed the detainees was 83°F and said it was likely much hotter inside due to the body heat.
Moskowitz said there was "evidence of flooding" and "floors that are only about eight inches above the ground," while other lawmakers noted that a hurricane or even a lighter tropical storm could prove catastrophic.
Last week, videos circulated on social media of the facility already beginning to flood due to a minor storm:
Moskowitz also noted the extraordinary cost to assemble and run the makeshift facility, which is estimated to cost $450 million per year according to one U.S. official who spoke to The Associated Press.
"Why are they spending all this money for this?" he asked. "One can't help but understand and conclude that this is a total cruel political stunt meant to have a spectacle of political theater."
The Trump administration has described the facility as a holding tank for "the worst of the worst" criminals as they await deportation. But according to reporting by the Miami Herald and Tampa Bay Times on Sunday, only a third of the people in the facility have criminal convictions, which range from crimes like attempted murder to traffic violations. More than 250 of the people in the facility have not been convicted of or even charged with a crime.
No outside journalists have been allowed to tour the facility, and there are no photos or videos available publicly beyond what has been released by the Trump government. The congresspeople on the tour were told they were not allowed to take any photos or videos inside or meet with any of the detainees.
Instead of being shown the conditions in which detainees were currently being housed, they were shown facilities that had not yet been filled. They were still denied access to some, including medical facilities.
Last week a group of Democrats in Florida's state legislature were turned away when they attempted to tour the camp, with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) saying they could not show up unannounced to perform oversight over a federal facility.
Frost said that there has been "ambiguity" about who has authority over the prison, but it was made abundantly clear during the visit that every decision being made was directed by the federal government.
"What we heard very clear is that ICE is giving them the directions from A to Z," he said. "Which means members of Congress are able to come here unannounced. And we will come here unannounced."
"Even with this invitation, so much was kept from us," Frost said.
In a video filmed while riding back from the camp, Frost spoke even more candidly about what he saw and how much it disturbed him.
Though the congresspeople were not given access to the detainees and "pushed back" by security guards, Frost said, "We could see in, and we could hear everybody."
"When those doors opened, what I saw made my heart sink," he said. "I saw a lot of people, young men, who looked like me."
"People were yelling, 'Help me, help me!' I heard in the back someone say, 'I'm a U.S. citizen,'" he continued. "And as we were walking away, they started chanting 'Libertad! Libertad! Libertad!'... 'Freedom.'"
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The Supreme Court Just Granted Trump a License to Erase Moral Responsibility
By permitting the U.S. government to deport asylum-seekers and noncriminal undocumented immigrants to random third countries, the six Republicans on the bench handed a dangerous tool to a man most inclined to abuse it.
Jun 26, 2025
The American people just got a taste of authoritarianism wrapped in judicial robes. In a stunning 6-3 ruling this week, the Supreme Court green-lit the mass deportation of immigrants, not to their home countries but to third nations where they have no legal status, no family, and often no hope.
In her dissent, Justice Sonja Sotomayor, calling the shadow docket ruling “inexcusable,” pointed out how destructive this is to the rule of law (both U.S. and international law largely prohibit this) and to the lives of the people who may be deported without due process:
The Government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone anywhere without notice or an opportunity to be heard. The episodes of noncompliance in this very case illustrate the risks.
The Due Process Clause represents “the principle that ours is a government of laws, not of men, and that we submit ourselves to rulers only if under rules.” By rewarding lawlessness, the court once again undermines that foundational principle.
In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution. In this case, the government took the opposite approach. It wrongfully deported one plaintiff to Guatemala, even though an Immigration judge found he was likely to face torture there. Then, in clear violation of a court order, it deported six more to South Sudan, a nation the State Department considers too unsafe for all but its most critical personnel.
This ruling by six corrupt Republican justices allows Donald Trump or any future president to designate any country they choose as a “safe third country” and deport people there without meaningful review, even if they’ve committed no crime and have a valid asylum claim.
If that sounds familiar, it should. It echoes one of the most cold-blooded decisions made by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime: to locate their extermination camps not within Germany, but in the foreign lands of occupied Poland.
Let’s be clear: Deportation is not genocide. But both decisions—then and now—are grounded in the same logic of moral evasion through geographic displacement.
When regimes want to commit acts that would stir conscience or provoke backlash at home, they find ways to outsource the cruelty.
The decision wasn’t just about deportation. It was about moral laundering, washing the blood off our hands by putting it on someone else’s tarmac.
The Nazi leadership understood that while Germany’s public had been bombarded with antisemitic propaganda for years, they still might balk at the wholesale slaughter of millions of people inside German borders. So they built Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec far away, deep in Poland, where there were no German newspapers, no prying eyes, and no courts to second-guess their machinery of death.
As Raul Hilberg and other Holocaust historians have documented, Nazi leaders like Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich made this decision deliberately to preserve the illusion of “moral cleanliness” at home while carrying out genocide abroad.
Today’s Trump version of this practice is more sanitized, but no less cynical.
By permitting the U.S. government to deport asylum-seekers and noncriminal undocumented immigrants to random third countries—often places they’ve never even set foot in—the Supreme Court has granted the executive branch a license to erase moral responsibility.
As long as the suffering happens somewhere else, we’re told, it’s not our fault. It’s not our soil. Not our responsibility.
That kind of logic is the death of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. As Federal Judge Patricia Millett said of Trump’s deportation of Venezuelan prisoners to a concentration camp in El Salvador, compared with FDR’s actions in WWII, “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act.”
A future president with dictatorial ambitions could cite this ruling to round up political dissidents, journalists, or whistleblowers and ship them off to “safe third countries” that are anything but.
The Trump administration argued—and the court’s on-the-take, Republican-appointed majority agreed—that migrants have no right to American judicial processes once they’re transferred elsewhere. In other words, we can dodge our legal obligations under both U.S. and international law simply by putting someone on a plane.
This is the same loophole thinking that allowed George W. Bush’s administration to kidnap terror suspects and ship them to places like Egypt and Syria, where they were tortured out of view. That policy was called “extraordinary rendition.” Today, we might call this new policy extraordinary rejection: a way to deny asylum without confronting its human cost.
And here’s the truly chilling part: Once someone has been deported to a third country, they are functionally outside the U.S. legal system. They can’t sue. They can’t appeal. They may not even survive. And, to Trump’s delight, it’ll all be outside the reach of American courts and U.S. media.
This obscene policy isn’t about safety, it’s about displacement as punishment and the creation of a pseudo-legal infrastructure of indifference to the humanity of the people we’re “processing.”
Whether it’s a camp outside Kraków or a deportation center in Guatemala, the strategy is the same: create a zone of moral invisibility. A legal no-man’s-land where acts that would outrage decent people become routine, because they happen far away, beyond the reach of media, law, and conscience.
That’s not how democracies behave: That’s how authoritarian regimes insulate themselves from dissent.
And like all authoritarian tools, once it exists, it will be used again.
You may think this only affects immigrants. But consider: The legal precedent now exists for the government to forcibly remove someone from U.S. soil and drop them in another country without due process. Today it’s asylum-seekers. Tomorrow, who knows?
A future president with dictatorial ambitions could cite this ruling to round up political dissidents, journalists, or whistleblowers and ship them off to “safe third countries” that are anything but.
You think that’s paranoid? So did people in 1932 Berlin.
The genius of the American system—at least in theory—is that it puts checks on state power. The executive cannot act like a king. The courts must protect the vulnerable. And the public must have visibility into the actions done in our name.
This week, though, the Supreme Court abdicated that role. And in doing so, the six Republicans on the bench handed a dangerous tool to a man most inclined to abuse it.
Let’s not kid ourselves. The decision wasn’t just about deportation. It was about moral laundering, washing the blood off our hands by putting it on someone else’s tarmac.
The Nazis did it. So did the Bush administration. Now Trump’s backers on the court have opened the door once more.
History doesn’t repeat, but, as Mark Twain said, it rhymes. And if we’re not careful, we may soon find that rhyme turning into a full verse we’ve heard before.
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