The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) must stop sharing certain Medicaid data with immigration authorities, a federal judge has ruled.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria, an Obama appointeed, issued a preliminary injunction on Aug. 12, finding that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a division of HHS, failed to conduct a “reasoned decision-making process” before deciding to provide the information to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), The Hill reported.
“To be sure, the Administration has made clear, through a series of Executive Orders and elsewhere, that immigration enforcement will become a higher priority in general,” Chhabria wrote. “But using CMS data about Medicaid patients for immigration enforcement involves unique policy tradeoffs.
