The Trump administration is compiling an unprecedented amount of personal data on a broad swath of Americans as it attempts to enhance immigration enforcement. The effort gathers information on citizens and non-citizens alike, and some lawmakers and civil liberties advocates say it violates privacy laws.
Much of the data – ranging from tax information to applications for food stamps and Medicaid – was long considered off-limits to immigration authorities. It has been assembled in large part by the Department of Government Efficiency, an unofficial federal agency that President Donald Trump established through an executive order to identify and eliminate what he described as “waste, fraud and abuse.”
However, privacy advocates say DOGE’s collection of sensitive information creates opportunities for abuse.
“Different government agencies necessarily collect information to provide essential services,” F. Mario Trujillo, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said in a statement to Straight Arrow News. “The danger comes when the government begins pooling that data and using it for reasons unrelated to the purpose it was collected. This administration has already proved that it can’t be trusted to handle sensitive data responsibly.”
Medicaid
The administration has taken an especially hard look at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which administers government health care programs for poor and elderly Americans.
Citing legal and ethical concerns, the agency tried to prevent the Department of Homeland Security from collecting the personal data, such as names, addresses, and Social Security numbers, of millions of Medicaid enrollees from California, Illinois, Washington and the District of Columbia. All provide Medicaid benefits to noncitizens without using federal funding, but the DHS request was not limited to those recipients.
Two top advisers to Health and Human Service Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ordered Medicaid officials to comply with the Homeland Security request – and gave them just 54 minutes to do so, The Associated Press reported.
The Department of Health and Human Services defended giving data to Homeland Security as “entirely within its legal authority” and described the effort as “focused on identifying waste, fraud and systemic abuse.”
Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that the move was fulfillment of Trump’s promise “to protect Medicaid for eligible beneficiaries” after former President Joe Biden “flooded our country with tens of millions of illegal aliens.”
However, in a letter to top administration officials, California Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, both Democrats, said the data transfer posed “significant concerns about possible violations” of federal privacy laws, and they demanded that Homeland Security “destroy any and all such data” it had obtained.
In a statement, California Gov. Gavin Newsom pointed to “numerous headlines highlighting potential improper federal use of personal information and federal actions to target the personal information of Americans.”
Internal Revenue Service
Homeland Security entered into an unprecedented agreement with the Internal Revenue Service allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to obtain confidential taxpayer information on undocumented immigrants. In a statement to Fox News, a Treasury Department spokesperson said the partnership would “establish a clear and secure process to support law enforcement’s efforts to combat illegal immigration.”
Acting IRS commissioner Melanie Krause resigned in protest, The Washington Post reported, and the immigrant rights groups Centro de Trabajadores Unidos and Immigrant Solidarity DuPage filed a lawsuit in March to block the data sharing.
A federal judge declined to block the agreement between the IRS and ICE in May, providing a new data stream for the Trump administration’s immigration objectives.
Social Security Administration
After gaining access to sensitive data at the Social Security Administration, Homeland Security and DOGE were accused of incorrectly labeling more than 6,100 mostly Latino immigrants as dead in an apparent effort to cut off their access to benefits. The move, the AP reported, was intended to encourage immigrants to self-deport.
Senior Social Security officials pushed back, saying the data sharing violated privacy laws surrounding government records. Records obtained by The Washington Post show that the immigrants listed as dead include a 13-year-old, a 14-year-old, two 16-year-olds and four 17-year-olds, as well as people in their 70s and one 83-year-old.
Some of those listed as deceased showed up at Social Security field offices with documentation proving their status as living, according to The Post.
White House spokeswoman Liz Huston called The Post’s reporting “false,” but did not describe how.
Housing and Urban Development
In March, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner announced an agreement to share data with Homeland Security, telling Fox News the initiative would ensure that taxpayer dollars “are not used to harbor or benefit illegal aliens.”
The data, which includes medical records, financial records, and information on victims of housing discrimination and domestic violence, had previously been protected from dissemination outside HUD.
Once it gained access to HUD data, DOGE pushed for a rule that would ban families that included undocumented immigrants from obtaining public housing, even if some family members had legal immigration status. DOGE, The Post reported, has also looked into evicting families that are already living in public housing if any members are undocumented, regardless of whether any of the others are citizens or eligible for benefits.
A Homeland Security official defended DOGE’s work, saying that “the government is finally doing what it should have all along: sharing information across the federal government to solve problems.”
Palantir
The information collected from multiple government agencies could be fed into a massive database operated by the data-mining Palantir, co-founded by billionaire Trump supporter Peter Thiel. ICE is paying Palantir $30 million to build a surveillance platform dubbed “ImmigrationOS.”
ICE has contracted with Palantir since 2011. It now seeks “near real-time visibility” on immigrants who self-deport, as well as those who have overstayed their visas, according to Wired. The database is intended to streamline the process of identifying and removing undocumented immigrants.
ICE has said it needs those capabilities to target criminal gangs composed largely of undocumented immigrants, such as MS-13 and Tren de Aragua.
Critics, however, note that recent immigration raids have involved widespread arrests of immigrants without criminal records, legal residents and even U.S. citizens.
