Comment by loeg

9 hours ago

Why would Medicaid have the data of anyone who is at risk of immigration enforcement? The reported connection seems tenuous:

> The tool – dubbed Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) – receives peoples’ addresses from the Department of Health and Human Services (which includes Medicaid) and other sources, 404 Media reports based on court testimony in Oregon by law enforcement agents, among other sources.

So, they have a tool that sucks up data from a bunch of different sources, including Medicaid. But there's no actual nexus between Medicaid and illegal immigrants in this reporting.

Edit: In the link to their earlier filings, EFF claims that some states enroll illegal immigrants in Medicaid: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/eff-court-protect-our-...

My wife works in autism services in a predominantly Latino city. Those kids all have Medicaid, which includes info about their parents. It would be pretty trivial to cross reference with other data points to identify kids with undocumented parents and then you have their home address. Many of these kids go to a clinic everyday, so now you know when someone (likely a parent) is dropping them off too. She’s had patients with parents who have been picked up by ICE. I wouldn’t be surprised if that data came from Medicaid. It’s basically the same as the IRS data they’ve been using.

And it is next to impossible for average people to get adequate care for their kids with autism without Medicaid and early intervention can make the difference between someone who can live relatively independently with supports and someone who will spend their adult life chemically restrained in an institution. So they are in between a rock and a hard place.

Pam Bondi is now demanding voter rolls. It's clearly about suppressing liberal voters in liberal areas through a show of force. They're using this data to optimize who to harass.

  • If citizenship is required to vote then how would accessing voter rolls suppress liberal voters? Honest question; I'm not concern trolling. I had to Google who's allowed to vote.

    I found this article[1] by the Brennan Center. It alleges this is an attempted federal takeover of elections but it doesn't suggest or allude to voter suppression. I'm not convinced by the article that having access to voter rolls can be considered a federal takeover of election administration (but I'm not in the know and would need things explained more verbosely).

    If you have more information about the attempted centralization of election administration and its impacts on voter suppression I would be interested to know more.

    1. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/trum...

    • Honestly my real fear is ICE agents at polling places on Election Day harassing would-be voters with citizenship checks and aggressive behavior, slowing things down and maybe causing some people to leave.

      Regarding voter data though, if it becomes known that registering to vote as a minority will get you extra scrutiny from ICE, and perhaps a visit to your home, that would probably cause some citizens avoid voting altogether, especially if they are associated with people who are not her legally.

      Either way, the federal government really has no right to that data or legitimate use for it, so hopefully they don't manage to get their hands on it.

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  • How does that work? As a US citizen, no amount of "harassment" is going to stop me from voting.

    • Voter registration gets names cross referenced to facebook gets you face recognition (Palantir can do this). Ice claims that facial recognition on their app is probable cause (Ice already claim this).

      Ice goes down the lines at voting stations to "protect from undocumented aliens voting illegally". The government endorsed news stories will be about how many illegals were trying to vote. Meanwhile a bunch of US citizens were taken for processing due to false positives and unfortunately with such large numbers to process they aren't all released until polling stations are closed. (If only someone hadn't botched the facial recognition database update and contaminated it with a bunch of Dem voters).

      If rioting against these actions occurs at a station, it's closed for safety and people in area are detained while it's sorted (the stations targeted had a tendency to vote D anyway as per voter roles).

      Strange how that 'harassment' did stop US citizens from voting.

      Results come in while the case for voter suppression goes to the Supreme court. Supreme court rules that while voter suppression did occur there is no legal option of redress within its permit and the peaceful transfer of power is more important than any one election A la Bush V Gore.

    • Seeing as the harassment has escalated to murder of citizens, I'm not so sure how you can say that.

      Less sensationally, they'll just crank up ID requirements and wait times to suppress your vote.

    • Are you a citizen, can you prove it at the polling station? I am doubtful you are, and your documents if you have them don't seem legit enough, so I think we'll set your vote aside, or possibly prevent it from being cast; we can't be too sure!

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    • you should read up on efforts to suppress the vote of certain US citizens, especially those who are poor and/or of color

Medicaid-receiving immigrants could have their immigration status change, legal violations, emergency medicaid use, sometimes there's state funded coverage that immigrants are offered, etc. There's lots of reasons where Medicaid will have information on immigrants.

  • That doesnt mean they are illegal right off the bat - there is no reasonable way to filter out the "illegal" members of the roles and essentially making it so the DOJ has a list of people who they can cross reference with expiring status and the moment the clock strikes midnight and their status changes they can get picked up. They should not have all those records for fishing expedititions.

Medicaid holds previous addresses, household details, previous diagnoses, ethnicity, etc.

It is quite trivial to infer if someone is likely to have emigrated to the US due to obvious gaps in records or in their relatives' ones.

This is what Palantir does, essentially. Simple inference and information fusion from different sources.

ICE has been harassing and following legal observers to their houses. They've shot and executed at least two people who were exercising their legal right to record their activity.

The FBI has been showing up at the door of some people who dare to organize protests against ICE.

Stingrays have been deployed to protests, ICE is collecting photos of protestors for their database, and has been querying YCombinator funded Flock to pull automated license plate camera data from around the country. Trump, Vance, Noem and Miller are calling anyone who protests them domestic terrorists.

It's pretty clear this isn't just about immigration, that this is about pooling data for a surveillance state that can quash the constitutional rights of anyone who dares to oppose the current regime. We've seen this story before.

  • When your whole system works by giving absolutely ridiculous amount of power to a single individual who has nobody above or at least on the side capable of interfering and changing things, this is what you eventually get. Crossing fingers and praying given person isn't a complete psycho or worse is not going to cut it forever, is it. Especially when >50% of population welcomes such person with open arms, knowing well who is coming.

    Given what kind of garbage from human gene pool gets and thrives in high politics its more surprising the show lasted as long as it did.

    Now the question shouldn't be 'how much outraged we should be' since we get this situation for a year at this point, but rather what to do next, how we can shape future to avoid this. If there will be the time for such correction, which is a huge IF.

    • I don't disagree with where you're coming from. But to be fair, our system did have separation of powers and rough legal accountability for most of the time it was accruing so much power. The fascists just managed to get enough of the Supreme Council on board to sweep these away under the guises of unitary executive theory and blanket immunity for their new president-king.

      So from this perspective it's a matter of a corrupted interpreter, meaning merely adding more legal restrictions won't work. Rather final ultimate authority needs to be distributed amongst the states. The unrest in Minnesota would be solved in a week if the governor could simply use the National Guard to restore law and order without worrying that the out of control federal executive would just take control of them and then have even more foot soldiers to escalate the situation with.

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    • If the Democrats didn't allow SCOTUS to become corrupted by the fascist right-wing, we wouldn't be in this situation.

      RBG refused to retire and died while Trump was president. That gave them one seat. Obama could have

      McConnel refused to let Obama replace Scalia after he died. I'm not sure that had to happen the way it went down.

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  • Excuse me discussing the fact that Jack booted fascist brown shirt thugs murdering people is a political statement and needs to be censored here

  • [flagged]

    • Renee Good blocked half the [small, suburban, low traffic, no lane markings] road and told the officers they were free to drive around her. I don't know what the blockage was about the but she seemingly wasn't trying to get in anyone's way.

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They hold both that people whose citizenship depends on birthright citizenship are not in fact citizens and that naturalized citizens can be denaturalized either for disloyalty or based on some sham pretext. They also see people getting benefits as leaches worthy of targeting.

Also naturalized and birthright citizens are far more likely than others to associate or live with others of less legal status.

Naturalized and birthright citizens quality for benefits and they and their families are at risk.

If they are allowed to detain and deport without any due process as they have asserted anyone not white is at risk.

The DHS official social media presence shared a picture of an island paradise with the caption America after 100 million deportations.

This is the number of non-whites not the number of immigrants in even the most ridiculous estimates.