Sacramento, California – California Attorney General Rob Bonta has won a big legal battle to safeguard the privacy of the millions of people who are enrolled in the state’s Medicaid program. A federal court has issued a preliminary injunction that stops the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from utilizing Medicaid data to enforce immigration laws. The decision also stops the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from giving this information to immigration officials.
California and a group of other states filed a lawsuit on July 1 against a program that started under the Trump Administration. That policy let DHS see private Medicaid information without the right protections or thought about what might happen. The group said that the decision broke the Administrative Procedure Act, which prohibits arbitrary and capricious rulemaking.
Attorney General Bonta was happy with the decision because it restores important protections for Medicaid patients. He said that the Trump Administration’s attempt to utilize healthcare data for immigration purposes scared and confused people, which made many immigrant families not sign up for or use services they were legally entitled to…