This just seems like a power grab to empower federal level personal thugs for the executive branch.
Most of these departments have rules about how they use our data. ICE now gobbles it all up and can use it without rules by a department that operates with little regard and lots of exceptions to typical protections for citizens afforded by the constitution.
The majority in SCOTUS does not seem to care (it’s ok as long as their guy does it). Whatever rules we thought there were seem to be out the window because someone magically moved data or ICE got to do it or so on ...
You’re technically correct, but in the last few decades a great deal of legal scholarship has gone into convincing the relevant parties that this isn’t so.
Doesn't the fact that they class immigration violations as civil not criminal changes quite a bit what actions the government is restricted by/constitutional protections?
There are some differences for illegal immigrants, though. For example they don't have the right to due process under expedited removal (passed by Bill Clinton in 1996).
Turns out the law is just two in the ink, one in the pinky finger in the air "I swear!". But in the end, the law is in people, the society is in people, not in paper, not in officials, not in institutions.
If the people carry something and change their minds and moods, have fun holding back that energy with a creaking dam made of paper. Even this Ice nightmare, was voted in democratic and will be one day, when the mood has swung again, pushed back by the people in some colorful revolution.
Getting access to Medicaid data for public health research is a giant pain in the ass with layers upon layers of red tape and IRBs and training about how you are allowed to handle it.
Only if it’s done in compliance. There was been little to show this administration follows the constitution, laws, or judicial orders let alone regulation. Especially when it comes to Stephen Miller there’s a significant “move fast and break the law” effort knowing judicial or legislative remedy can take a long time and is not assured given the penetration of captured justices and congressional independence. Especially in something like this where you have to establish standing, do discovery, etc, it’s an uphill battle to ensure compliance and the out of compliance stuff happens behind closed doors. With most of the federal government oversight functions either gutted or entirely captured by politically partisan sycophants, I would not hold my breath expecting any boundaries or relief.
This is what a real deep state looks like. “He who smelt it dealt it” seems to be a natural law.
>Getting access to Medicaid data for public health research is a giant pain in the ass with layers upon layers of red tape and IRBs and training about how you are allowed to handle it.
Can you contextualize this comment? Are you saying it shouldnt be so difficult? Or that the government should have to jump through the same hoops? Or?
> Most of these departments have rules about how they use our data
Yes, but law enforcement agencies can typically be granted access for investigations, so long as the information is used only for such investigations. This is how CSAM distributors are hunted down. They don't literally need to amass evidence for each and every suspect and then get a warrant: they have a legally recognized enforcement directive, and so can perform surveillance of information sources where that people breaking those laws can be caught. Or in this case, they may have imperfect information on a variety of actual suspects, but not enough to find them or build a case. Medicaid data may provide those clues.
You put that between parentheses as if it was just a detail, but it is the fundamental question that nobody is talking about: what happens after their guy is gone?
Are they really ok with president AOC getting all of Trump’s powers? Or do they secretly hope democracy in the U.S. comes to a halt?
We've seen the GOP reaction at a State level. When a Dem governor is about to take office, the GOP legislature passes sweeping bills to limit executive power and the about-to-be-former GOP Governor signs them.
I’m pretty tuned in to the conservative water cooler, and I’ve heard three realistic theories on post-Trump executive power. To be clear, these are real opinions I’ve heard self-described Trump voters espouse—not my opinions:
1. Most of the federal judges and SCOTUS will overturn bits and pieces of executive power once a Democrat tries to use them. See Biden and school loan forgiveness. They firmly believe that Thomas and Alito will retire during this administration, and they hope Sotomayor or Kagan retires or dies. I’ve also heard noise about impeaching Barrett.
2. Democrats are too skittish to use executive power to do anything revolutionary with it. Even when they had a trifecta during the first Obama term they barely did anything with it.
3. Regardless of the other two points, it’s very unlikely for the Republicans to lose control of House and Senate again, and the Senate can revert to being effective when the executive is a Democrat. A Republican House can constantly submit articles of impeachment and a Democrat president will get bogged down dodging the accusations, even if they’re spurious.
> Are they really ok with president AOC getting all of Trump’s powers?
I can confidently predict that whatever out-the-arse-shadow-docket rulings SCOTUS have made for Trump will suddenly not apply to a Democratic president and the office will be hamstrung by executive limits pretty darn toot suite.
This isn't new at all and has been happening for decades, a continuous ratcheting up of Presidential and Executive Branch power since the dawn of the Cold War. Usually it's because of "national security," and it happens when both parties are in power. The march pretty much began with the National Security Act of 1947, though some might place it earlier with FDR and the New Deal. An argument can be made for both, with the left tending to blame the former and the right the latter. (I think the real answer is both to some extent but the National Security Act is the more significant of the two.)
An argument can be made after things like the second Iraq war that we have already entered the decadent empire phase of US history and the President effectively does have a great deal of dictatorial power. It's not supposed to be possible to wage a war like that without a congressional declaration, making such wars a pretty huge abdication of power by the legislative branch. If the President can just start a war on a whim, that power can be used to drag along the entire rest of the government.
Now, with ICE, we are establishing a lawless executive branch police force. This is just the unilateral power of the President to wage war coming home and being applied to domestic affairs. It will soon be possible, if it isn't already, for the President to order their own independent police to do anything, and if it is considered illegal the power of the pardon can be used to make that go away. The arbitrary power of the pardon is a pretty awesome power when you think about it.
When the ratchet gets far enough down this path we may indeed see a president remain in power forever like Xi Xinpeng. Trump may or may not be that person. If it's not him it might be the next, or the next. It could just as easily be a left-wing populist demagogue as a right-wing one depending on which way the winds happen to be blowing when the final ratchet click happens.
Rome continued to exist for quite some time after its Republic collapsed, but it was definitely the beginning of the end.
> The majority in SCOTUS does not seem to care (it’s ok as long as their guy does it).
I doubt they'd care if a democratic president wanted to do the exact same thing...
Their job isn't to be benevolent.
Their job is to determine what is ACCORDING to the laws. The reality is, many legal protections only apply to US citizens - and it is EXPLICITLY for these reasons that they do.
The Privacy Act of 1974 applies only to citizens. The Patriot Act opened up a can of worms ripe for abuse that will probably never be sealed.
The executive branch can almost get away with murder by saying, "Well, we thought they were a terrorist, so..." Which does appear to be the defense they're trying to set up, saying anyone in any, way, shape or form related to Mexican gangs is a terrorist.
The Supreme Court doesn't really seem to be exceptionally awful.
They're obviously bias, and have been for a very long time, if you look at how they vote.
But the larger problem is that we have bad laws.
It's not the Supreme Court's job to override laws passed by congress because they're terrible or anti-American.
It's our job as voters to start caring about what matters.
> I doubt they'd care if a democratic president wanted to do the exact same thing...
Of course they would. They literally blocked Biden's student loan relief, calling it unconstitutional. These people are not there because they are exceptional legal scholars or because they established themselves as outstanding judges in their previous appointments. The six majority justices are there to help their side wield power, pure and simple. And they understand that part of that job is making it difficult for the other side to wield power. Because only their side is legitimate, you see.
> The Supreme Court doesn't really seem to be exceptionally awful.
The are exceptionally, extremely, extraordinarily awful. When the DC circuit court ruled on presidential immunity, legal scholars across the land pointed to the ruling as the probable last word, given how sterling the ruling was. Many were shocked that the Supreme Court even took the case up afterward. After all, what more was there to say? To have the SCOTUS overrule two centuries of established precedent in making the entire Executive branch above criminal law shocked just about everyone - this entirely for the purpose of keeping a single man out of jail.
> It's not the Supreme Court's job to override laws passed by congress because they're terrible or anti-American.
That is exactly their job, if said laws are unconstitutional.
This sounded like a straight-forward HIPAA violation, but I checked. There's a carve out for LE.
You can see the bones of a stronger limit during drafting (as "required" by warrants), but then weakened to allow mere "administrative requests".
> Law Enforcement Purposes. Covered entities may disclose protected health information to law enforcement officials for law enforcement purposes under the following six circumstances, and subject to specified conditions: (1) as required by law (including court orders, court-ordered warrants, subpoenas) and administrative requests; (2) to identify or locate a suspect, fugitive, material witness, or missing person; (3) in response to a law enforcement official's request for information about a victim or suspected victim of a crime; (4) to alert law enforcement of a person's death, if the covered entity suspects that criminal activity caused the death; (5) when a covered entity believes that protected health information is evidence of a crime that occurred on its premises; and (6) by a covered health care provider in a medical emergency not occurring on its premises, when necessary to inform law enforcement about the commission and nature of a crime, the location of the crime or crime victims, and the perpetrator of the crime.
Additionally from the article the data seems limited to identification information and not medical information.
Language in the agreement says it will allow ICE to access personal
information such as home addresses, phone numbers, IP addresses, banking
data, and social security numbers. (Later on in the agreement, what ICE is
allowed to access is defined differently, specifying just “Medicaid
recipients” and their sex, ethnicity, and race but forgoing any mention of IP
or banking data.) The agreement is set to last two months. While the document
is dated July 9, it is only effective starting when both parties sign it,
which would indicate a 60-day span from July 15 to September 15.
They are coming? They are already here. RE: What the president said about Rosie O'donnell last week. Norms have been eroded and we are now clearly in the laws-are-being-eroded territory.
Oh really? And charge them with what? The USA doesn't have vague laws around social harmony by which to prosecute people. This is exactly why it's so important to protect so called "hate speech".
People are being violently kidnapped off the street by masked men and exiled to secret prisons with zero due process and you're over here worrying about charges and laws lol
The tendency to replace what is actually happening with some dark figment of the imagination is telling. Do you have real objections or just conspiracies?
Immigrants are the electorate and have always been. *They* are what make America great, not some racist, talentless bums who believe they are entitled to an entire nation by virtue of their ancestry.
It doesn't matter who compiles the lists anymore. Corporations will sell that data to the government (and anyone else willing to pay enough) or the government will march in and take it by force.
As long as lists of people are useful they will be created, and as long as our government is unaccountable to the people and the law those lists will be at risk of being abused by the state for other purposes.
Its the other way around, authoritarian governments will now compile even more and larger lists of everything they can possibly get from their citizens. North Korea would be proud of what this administration is doing.
In many other countries, people would be asking "This is horrible, how can we bring down this leader, and how can we ensure that it never happens again?"
But here in glorious America, people are asking "This is inevitable, how can we starve the government more, so that it cannot hurt us when it eventually tries to?"
It's telling that, every time there's an election, we keep hearing complaints about who can vote, because its citizens decided that the government shouldn't keep track of who are its citizens and where they live. In most other countries it's the government's job to issue a photo ID to every citizen, but no, here in America that sounds too convenient and it must be some evil big-gov agenda.
Trump getting elected wasn’t inevitable. There were unusual events during the 2016 election campaign that could have resulted in a different outcome if their timing had been different.
Billionaires paid for Hillary, dems couldn't be bothered to listen to the people. Took 0 responsibility for it. Just took her campaign war chest and dumped it into a media smear campaign.
But the lists were compiled before Trump took office. Countries that have experience with totalitarianism don't make those lists to begin with.
That's why in France, for example, it's illegal for the government to keep track of people's race or religion. When the Nazis occupied France they used such documents to figure out who the Jews were.
Client Side Scanning tried to hash your files to help the government find any "child predators" using iPhone.
You know, the same federal government that refused to assign a special prosecutor to the Epstein files. You can rest assured Apple and the Fed are very interested in protecting the children. Anyone who refuses to allow that sort of process is probably a criminal anyways, right?
The article states that the agreement claims compliance with a 2019 System of Records Notice, which it says allows the data to be used "to assist another federal or state agency."
The article notes that a former information security lead from the VA says the SORN needs to be updated for this specific ICE/CMS agreement and has not been. Clearly that fact is a disputed.
The ACLU argues that the sharing is only allowed if it contributes to the accuracy of Medicare or Medicaid, administers a federal health benefits program, or is necessary to implement a federally funded health benefits program. Im not sure if this it true (sharing only allowed in these cases) but if so it seems reasonable that detecting fraud would contribute to the accuracy and integrity of Medicaid. Furthermore, ICE does administer a federal health benefits program (IHSC [1]), so the basis for the ACLU's objection really seems unfounded, although the administration doesnt cite this basis and is quite upfront that its about identifying illegal aliens.
I personally think it's a first run for a secret police force, maybe coming as soon as next year. This will help them test the waters as well as set up facilities and training centers they can leverage later for a new stasi type force.
I attended Amazon Re:Invent a number of years ago and one of the keynote speakers was talking about providing medical information to law enforcement - the theory being that if they know you suffer from schizophrenia, for instance, the police would be informed of this and in theory less likely to murder you.
I found the whole idea very prone to abuse and posted about it on social media, and the whole thread flew into people fighting about Obamacare… but I still think I was right.
The older I get, the more I become a strong proponent of keeping data out of the hands of the people who can murder you without recourse.
they still are giving ICE 4X the money as before to set up a first draft speedrun of a secret police force that can run around grabbing people off the street with no ID, masks on, and tossing them in white vans to imprison them without due process or court hearings and send them to 3rd world nations for indefinite internment. This is likely see if the public will stand against it.
Great, thanks for correcting the figure, my bad. The news reported 150bn for Pentagon but it appears this is just the money for a few specific projects.
That is the danger of central data collection. I know we like to pretend that federal departments are discrete units. At the end of the day the federal government owns the data. No subpoena needed if your boss already owns the data. You just have to ask nicely.
The problem is even worse when that data is in private hands. One of the most common ways the government gets data they couldn't justify subpoenaing themselves is to simply hand over cash to corporations who have already collected that data for other uses. for example: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/how-law-enforcement-ar...
I've never thought that controls prevented centralizing all our data, but incompetence and just bureaucratic bloat.
We are very, very far away from a state where the government doesn't know all about you. Im not sure what we should do about that fact. Im not simply arguing for an inevitable erosion of privacy on one end or soveriegn citizenship, for example, on the other. It's just that you would have to rewind way back. Social security, income taxes, etc.
No government agency should get access to any private data without the appropriate protocols in place. Even more so considering the many issues surrounding ICE and their actions already, this will not improve things. Let alone the moral problem of trying to deport people which have been used by American companies for cheap labour to build the nation they want and supposedly are. Now of course that is ignoring the ludicrous view that undocumented migrants are the key issue, as opposed to so many other home made issues in the US, such as unfair wealth disparity, and a lack of fundamental basic rights for citizens.
I find it interesting that outside of the political headlines the surge in deportations remains lower than that during the Obama and Biden administrations.
Not trying to make a political statement here just pointing out oddities between reported data online perception.
Note* this data could be inaccurate ?
“ Deportation Numbers: While arrests have risen sharply, the administration's impact on actual deportation rates is still being assessed.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, the Trump administration is on track to deport roughly half a million people this year, which is below the target of one million annually and less than the 685,000 recorded in fiscal year 2024 under President Joe Biden.”
that's because the border is down to like 5% of what it was. Now they have to hunt down people instead of just watching them come across the border and grabbing them by the thousands
I've always felt DX was an ironically realistic vision of 2052 when you consider what the average person would be able to see.
Sure, the protagonist sees hidden bunkers with weird science, but the average person? It's hard find work, their votes don't seem to matter, there's no real privacy anymore, and nobody will honor the warranty on the little floor-cleaner robot.
TBH things like EFF and such were a reality, and the devs for sure they were aware, as they knew geeky/nerdy games like Nethack too; and deducing knowledge about free software and digital rights it's trivial.
Also, Deus Ex and the Unreal Engine had a GL renderer with worked amazingly great with Wine back in the day, it was one of the best games to run in early 00's. Yeah, the game was propietary and yadda, yadda; but there's the Surreal engine (libre implementation of Unreal1) on the works.
Another game on dystopias which looks parodical but it's heavily reality grounded it's Liberal Crime Squad. As an European I know near nil about the USA goverment branches and how the goverment it's built, but that game taught me the process exceptionally well. And, yes, it's a must play giving how current politics are going:
"We are going to beat the swamp by adding more swamp with a stasi twist" seems to be the motto of the new regime. This isn't what MAGAs or conservatives voted for, but were warned they were going to get.
I don't understand why ICE would need access to Medicaid data. You need to be a citizen or lawful permanent resident to access that program, not to mention all the other additional criteria. The idea of illegal immigrants somehow bypassing all the checks and balances successfully en masse feels a little silly to me.
They have a pamphlet available one more click away from the link you shared that gives detailed information on how undocumented immigrants can get free/reduced-cost health care, and what all of their options are: https://www.wahealthplanfinder.org/content/dam/wahbe-assets/...
Some states have different requirements for undocumented persons. Most states permit medicaid for emergency situations. Some permit it for pregnant people.
Are there any states where Medicaid funds "emergency situations" for people who are not otherwise eligible for Medicaid? I've never heard of that. EMTALA requires hospitals to treat anyone in emergency situations, but doesn't to my knowledge provide a mechanism to pay for those treatments. The patient still gets billed and hospital likely just doesn't get paid.
My understanding from reading the federal website is that this would not be Medicaid, it would be a different program. So they would not be in the Medicaid database, right?
A lot of states evidently give Medicaid to illegal aliens as well. ICE wants this data to track down those persons. I feel it's illegal and overreach, but Congress has turned into a rubber stamp for Trump and just sitting on their thumbs, albeit some have furrowed brows and "concerns". None of them do anything though. Congress should be the main power in Washington, not our new King in Orange.
Several blue states expanded their medicaid programs to allow illegals. This was with the intention to pay for it with state dollars instead of federal dollars.
Some states even allow legal temporary visa visitors like students to sign up for their state level funded medicaid. NY is constitutionally required to do so.
ICE however is making a play to obtain all of that state level data.
California gives medi-cal to undocumented migrants, paid for by the California general fund. The same program also administers federal medicaid funds for eligible Californians. It's a very different reality than you're trying to present.
Lots of people with no papers buy social security numbers so they can work legit jobs- and you could presumably get benefits too. Presumably they're looking for people who don't make sense- receiving benefits in two states, live in Minnesota but get benefits in Arizona, that sort of thing.
> Tom Homan, as well as Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller have made very clear that they intend on spending the billions in this bill. Tom Homan said this week that they want to arrest 7,000 people every day for the remainder of the administration
They've asserted their authority to send people to another country that they came from, like sending people Liberia and South Sudan. So it looks like you are the one living in an echo chamber rather then reality.
I'll never understand the inclination to voice an opinion based on a reality which is easily disproved with a few minutes or googling / reading actual news. Seems like there are three options: 1) You're uninformed; 2) You're misinformed; 3) You're acting in bad faith. If (1), perhaps don't speak on a subject you know nothing about, especially a subject which is severely harming others. If (2), then you should take your own advice regarding echo chambers. Not much to say about (3) other than it is best to avoid engaging people acting in bad faith.
The Nazis were claiming they'd deport the Jews at first. It never goes directly to death camps, it's baby steps of normalization.
> "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
- Milton Meyer, They Thought They Were Free - The Germans, 1933 - 1945
They are deporting babies born here and have never lived anywhere else, some taken right out of the hospital
There are kids sitting right now in cages at Alligator Auschwitz without an adult for days and days and have never known any other country
Your parents were born in this country? How about their parents?
Because now they've run out of "criminals" they are putting people with legal status ("green cards") into the concentration-camps and when they run out of those next year who do you think they are going to keep busy with?
US Citizens have sat for days in prison before even given the chance to show citizenship, why don't you think that's going to happen to you eventually?
That's not what they're preparing to do. They're building open air prisons for tens of thousands of people. It would take years to deport that many people. If they fill these things it will be a humanitarian disaster.
The amount of precedent being set here for big government and overreach is amazing. I'm not really surprised though that Conservatives and other small/limited governemnt people worked to enact this massive overreach of power.
The GOP is not a party of small/limited government people. It's a party of people who want absolute control and use the language of small/limited government to gain power.
Both parties are the same. Democrats want to make it illegal to protect myself from a violent attacker, enact legislation designed to block poor people from starting businesses, buy votes by promising handouts. They are both filthy and dirty and serve corporations.
Many poor children are on Medicaid. If you are born in the US to an undocumented person then you are a citizen and eligible for Medicaid. So they can use this info to find the undocumented parents of these kids and deport and disappear them. Then the kids have to chose between staying with their family or leaving the only country that have ever known.
> Medicaid, state and federally government-funded health care coverage for the country’s poorest, is largely available only to some non-citizens, including refugees and asylum seekers, survivors of human trafficking, and permanent residents. Some states, like New York, provide Medicaid coverage for children and pregnant people, regardless of their immigration status. States report their Medicaid expenditures and data to the federal government, which reimburses them for some of the costs.
The Trump admin is aggressively deporting refugees and asylum seekers who entered legally.
California provides full coverage to undocumented migrants. This is who the administration is targeting.
As a related aside, Federally-funded California clinics are about to start requiring proof of citizenship. This is causing a panic.
Also, due to the massive cost of providing care to undocumented migrants, Newsom is about to freeze all registrations for Medi-Cal (so the message is get in now before the gates close). He's also proposing charging undocumented migrants a modest premium.
It’s not all state dollars though. There’s a Medicaid match for ACA expansion populations. The OBBB reduces that match by 10% for states that expanded the population to include unauthorized immigrants. In Oregon, to maintain that program Oregonians are going to have to pony up hundreds of millions more per year. Much of the country is fine with that.
"Illegals" can't use full Medicaid, they can only receive emergency care which hospitals are required to give by law. That's what that $4.5B figure is – emergency care, labor, delivery, etc. Furthermore, undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes each year, including the payroll taxes that fund Medicaid and Medicare. Taxpayers aren't on the hook, because these immigrants are already paying in for services they can't even use.
So they can use (expensive) emergency care but also they are paying for (cheap) services they can’t even use? That’s some interesting logic. Clearly they can and do use some of these services.
Our country is massively in debt, and healthcare fraud is off the charts currently.
We don't need more people exploiting the system.
Legal immigrants pay into the system, and do their fair share.
The illegals broadly do not support federal expenses.
> Personally, I'm ok paying 30 bucks a year to make sure fellow human beings in the US don't die of preventable causes in our streets
EMTALA forces hospitals to treat emergent conditions regardless of ability to pay/status.
But what you are talking about as "preventable causes" sounds more like chronic conditions and universalized healthcare that does not meet the definition of emergent situations.
Most of the time when you submit paperwork for someone that is applying for a VISA here you'll provide information from a citizen/permanent resident, so they likely want to find the person that helped/sponsored your paperwork so they can get to you. Might be a good way to find bogus Medicaid fraud and strip you from your permanent residency or citizenship or just say you're abetting a criminal (someone living here illegaly), there are plenty of uses for this data if you're evil enough.
Presumably if it was illegal they would use that term and 'nefarious' isn't within editorial guidelines.
I'm not sure those are the threshold for being noteworthy. A novel application of medical payment information seems worth one's attention but you don't need to click through.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250718155208/https://www.wired...
https://archive.ph/a9KaW
This just seems like a power grab to empower federal level personal thugs for the executive branch.
Most of these departments have rules about how they use our data. ICE now gobbles it all up and can use it without rules by a department that operates with little regard and lots of exceptions to typical protections for citizens afforded by the constitution.
The majority in SCOTUS does not seem to care (it’s ok as long as their guy does it). Whatever rules we thought there were seem to be out the window because someone magically moved data or ICE got to do it or so on ...
> lots of exceptions to typical protections for citizens afforded by the constitution
Almost the entire US constitution applies to non-citizens in the country, with some small exceptions like voting and holding public office.
You’re technically correct, but in the last few decades a great deal of legal scholarship has gone into convincing the relevant parties that this isn’t so.
On paper, but the average citizen and current admin disagree. The check & balances also don't seem to work.
Does anything other than due process rights help for people facing deportation?
Doesn't the fact that they class immigration violations as civil not criminal changes quite a bit what actions the government is restricted by/constitutional protections?
There are some differences for illegal immigrants, though. For example they don't have the right to due process under expedited removal (passed by Bill Clinton in 1996).
Since medicade wasn't established by the constitution, how do resident aliens get coverage? Maybe they do, maybe they don't. I'd like to know.
Turns out the law is just two in the ink, one in the pinky finger in the air "I swear!". But in the end, the law is in people, the society is in people, not in paper, not in officials, not in institutions.
If the people carry something and change their minds and moods, have fun holding back that energy with a creaking dam made of paper. Even this Ice nightmare, was voted in democratic and will be one day, when the mood has swung again, pushed back by the people in some colorful revolution.
Getting access to Medicaid data for public health research is a giant pain in the ass with layers upon layers of red tape and IRBs and training about how you are allowed to handle it.
Only if it’s done in compliance. There was been little to show this administration follows the constitution, laws, or judicial orders let alone regulation. Especially when it comes to Stephen Miller there’s a significant “move fast and break the law” effort knowing judicial or legislative remedy can take a long time and is not assured given the penetration of captured justices and congressional independence. Especially in something like this where you have to establish standing, do discovery, etc, it’s an uphill battle to ensure compliance and the out of compliance stuff happens behind closed doors. With most of the federal government oversight functions either gutted or entirely captured by politically partisan sycophants, I would not hold my breath expecting any boundaries or relief.
This is what a real deep state looks like. “He who smelt it dealt it” seems to be a natural law.
>Getting access to Medicaid data for public health research is a giant pain in the ass with layers upon layers of red tape and IRBs and training about how you are allowed to handle it.
Can you contextualize this comment? Are you saying it shouldnt be so difficult? Or that the government should have to jump through the same hoops? Or?
> The majority in SCOTUS does not seem to care
Well plain 'rules' are going to be firmly within the executive's discretion to change. So what you need is statutes.
Statutes might not help much though, due to the immunity/pardon hack. And we may even be seeing SCOTUS reexamine if the president is bound by statute.
This is fine.
> Most of these departments have rules about how they use our data
Yes, but law enforcement agencies can typically be granted access for investigations, so long as the information is used only for such investigations. This is how CSAM distributors are hunted down. They don't literally need to amass evidence for each and every suspect and then get a warrant: they have a legally recognized enforcement directive, and so can perform surveillance of information sources where that people breaking those laws can be caught. Or in this case, they may have imperfect information on a variety of actual suspects, but not enough to find them or build a case. Medicaid data may provide those clues.
(it’s ok as long as their guy does it)
You put that between parentheses as if it was just a detail, but it is the fundamental question that nobody is talking about: what happens after their guy is gone?
Are they really ok with president AOC getting all of Trump’s powers? Or do they secretly hope democracy in the U.S. comes to a halt?
We've seen the GOP reaction at a State level. When a Dem governor is about to take office, the GOP legislature passes sweeping bills to limit executive power and the about-to-be-former GOP Governor signs them.
If a democratic president is elected they will reverse their decisions until a GOP president is elected again.
> Or do they secretly hope democracy in the U.S. comes to a halt?
Hope? They're working on it. And they're not being particularly secretive about it.
Consider that you're already having to ask this question 6 months into a 4 year term, and what happened the last time their guy lost an election.
I’m pretty tuned in to the conservative water cooler, and I’ve heard three realistic theories on post-Trump executive power. To be clear, these are real opinions I’ve heard self-described Trump voters espouse—not my opinions:
1. Most of the federal judges and SCOTUS will overturn bits and pieces of executive power once a Democrat tries to use them. See Biden and school loan forgiveness. They firmly believe that Thomas and Alito will retire during this administration, and they hope Sotomayor or Kagan retires or dies. I’ve also heard noise about impeaching Barrett.
2. Democrats are too skittish to use executive power to do anything revolutionary with it. Even when they had a trifecta during the first Obama term they barely did anything with it.
3. Regardless of the other two points, it’s very unlikely for the Republicans to lose control of House and Senate again, and the Senate can revert to being effective when the executive is a Democrat. A Republican House can constantly submit articles of impeachment and a Democrat president will get bogged down dodging the accusations, even if they’re spurious.
> Are they really ok with president AOC getting all of Trump’s powers?
I can confidently predict that whatever out-the-arse-shadow-docket rulings SCOTUS have made for Trump will suddenly not apply to a Democratic president and the office will be hamstrung by executive limits pretty darn toot suite.
Secretly?
>Are they really ok with president AOC getting all of Trump’s powers? Or do they secretly hope democracy in the U.S. comes to a halt?
They aren't even being remotely secretive about it.
This isn't new at all and has been happening for decades, a continuous ratcheting up of Presidential and Executive Branch power since the dawn of the Cold War. Usually it's because of "national security," and it happens when both parties are in power. The march pretty much began with the National Security Act of 1947, though some might place it earlier with FDR and the New Deal. An argument can be made for both, with the left tending to blame the former and the right the latter. (I think the real answer is both to some extent but the National Security Act is the more significant of the two.)
An argument can be made after things like the second Iraq war that we have already entered the decadent empire phase of US history and the President effectively does have a great deal of dictatorial power. It's not supposed to be possible to wage a war like that without a congressional declaration, making such wars a pretty huge abdication of power by the legislative branch. If the President can just start a war on a whim, that power can be used to drag along the entire rest of the government.
Now, with ICE, we are establishing a lawless executive branch police force. This is just the unilateral power of the President to wage war coming home and being applied to domestic affairs. It will soon be possible, if it isn't already, for the President to order their own independent police to do anything, and if it is considered illegal the power of the pardon can be used to make that go away. The arbitrary power of the pardon is a pretty awesome power when you think about it.
When the ratchet gets far enough down this path we may indeed see a president remain in power forever like Xi Xinpeng. Trump may or may not be that person. If it's not him it might be the next, or the next. It could just as easily be a left-wing populist demagogue as a right-wing one depending on which way the winds happen to be blowing when the final ratchet click happens.
Rome continued to exist for quite some time after its Republic collapsed, but it was definitely the beginning of the end.
Indeed seems this way. Also consider the recent budget bill increased ICE's budget 3X and it's now more funded than the entire federal prison system.
This is roughly on the level of post Pearl Harbor internement of Japanese people, with potential to grow larger.
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I think HIPAA always had a carve-out for LE. Trump is lawless, but this might not be.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44606965
> The majority in SCOTUS does not seem to care (it’s ok as long as their guy does it).
I doubt they'd care if a democratic president wanted to do the exact same thing...
Their job isn't to be benevolent.
Their job is to determine what is ACCORDING to the laws. The reality is, many legal protections only apply to US citizens - and it is EXPLICITLY for these reasons that they do.
The Privacy Act of 1974 applies only to citizens. The Patriot Act opened up a can of worms ripe for abuse that will probably never be sealed.
The executive branch can almost get away with murder by saying, "Well, we thought they were a terrorist, so..." Which does appear to be the defense they're trying to set up, saying anyone in any, way, shape or form related to Mexican gangs is a terrorist.
The Supreme Court doesn't really seem to be exceptionally awful.
They're obviously bias, and have been for a very long time, if you look at how they vote.
But the larger problem is that we have bad laws.
It's not the Supreme Court's job to override laws passed by congress because they're terrible or anti-American.
It's our job as voters to start caring about what matters.
> I doubt they'd care if a democratic president wanted to do the exact same thing...
Of course they would. They literally blocked Biden's student loan relief, calling it unconstitutional. These people are not there because they are exceptional legal scholars or because they established themselves as outstanding judges in their previous appointments. The six majority justices are there to help their side wield power, pure and simple. And they understand that part of that job is making it difficult for the other side to wield power. Because only their side is legitimate, you see.
> The Supreme Court doesn't really seem to be exceptionally awful.
The are exceptionally, extremely, extraordinarily awful. When the DC circuit court ruled on presidential immunity, legal scholars across the land pointed to the ruling as the probable last word, given how sterling the ruling was. Many were shocked that the Supreme Court even took the case up afterward. After all, what more was there to say? To have the SCOTUS overrule two centuries of established precedent in making the entire Executive branch above criminal law shocked just about everyone - this entirely for the purpose of keeping a single man out of jail.
> It's not the Supreme Court's job to override laws passed by congress because they're terrible or anti-American.
That is exactly their job, if said laws are unconstitutional.
> The reality is, many legal protections only apply to US citizens - and it is EXPLICITLY for these reasons that they do.
This is just explicitly not true in our constitution. If you're a textualist, you're not allowed to believe this - sorry.
This sounded like a straight-forward HIPAA violation, but I checked. There's a carve out for LE.
You can see the bones of a stronger limit during drafting (as "required" by warrants), but then weakened to allow mere "administrative requests".
> Law Enforcement Purposes. Covered entities may disclose protected health information to law enforcement officials for law enforcement purposes under the following six circumstances, and subject to specified conditions: (1) as required by law (including court orders, court-ordered warrants, subpoenas) and administrative requests; (2) to identify or locate a suspect, fugitive, material witness, or missing person; (3) in response to a law enforcement official's request for information about a victim or suspected victim of a crime; (4) to alert law enforcement of a person's death, if the covered entity suspects that criminal activity caused the death; (5) when a covered entity believes that protected health information is evidence of a crime that occurred on its premises; and (6) by a covered health care provider in a medical emergency not occurring on its premises, when necessary to inform law enforcement about the commission and nature of a crime, the location of the crime or crime victims, and the perpetrator of the crime.
https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/laws-reg...
Additionally from the article the data seems limited to identification information and not medical information.
You still think this is just about immigrants? They are coming for the dissenters next, they will just make excuses as to why.
They are coming? They are already here. RE: What the president said about Rosie O'donnell last week. Norms have been eroded and we are now clearly in the laws-are-being-eroded territory.
Correct. Rosie is an American citizen born in the US and Trump threatened to "revoke" her citizenship.
We are all provisional citizens at this point.
Oh really? And charge them with what? The USA doesn't have vague laws around social harmony by which to prosecute people. This is exactly why it's so important to protect so called "hate speech".
People are being violently kidnapped off the street by masked men and exiled to secret prisons with zero due process and you're over here worrying about charges and laws lol
How about they just black-bag her and she’s never heard from again? How will we prosecute that overreach and outright law breaking?
They stopped worrying about charging people about two months ago.
The tendency to replace what is actually happening with some dark figment of the imagination is telling. Do you have real objections or just conspiracies?
This is something that the President is *literally talking about*: https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/18/us/us-citizenship-revocation-...
But, of course, you already know that. So why bother with the theatrics?
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Just to clarify, you're espousing the Great Replacement Theory here, correct?
Immigrants are the electorate and have always been. *They* are what make America great, not some racist, talentless bums who believe they are entitled to an entire nation by virtue of their ancestry.
What evidence do you have to believe that’s true?
the 1950s comes to mind...
Does the state you live in have concentration camps, yet?
Deportations without due-process, for a start. Why not deprive you of due process, too?
Trump just said he's going to try to take Rosie O Donnell's citizenship away.
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The inevitable end of all government compiled lists of people
It doesn't matter who compiles the lists anymore. Corporations will sell that data to the government (and anyone else willing to pay enough) or the government will march in and take it by force.
As long as lists of people are useful they will be created, and as long as our government is unaccountable to the people and the law those lists will be at risk of being abused by the state for other purposes.
Its the other way around, authoritarian governments will now compile even more and larger lists of everything they can possibly get from their citizens. North Korea would be proud of what this administration is doing.
I think they meant 'end' as in the 'ultimate destination' rather than 'conclusion'.
In many other countries, people would be asking "This is horrible, how can we bring down this leader, and how can we ensure that it never happens again?"
But here in glorious America, people are asking "This is inevitable, how can we starve the government more, so that it cannot hurt us when it eventually tries to?"
It's telling that, every time there's an election, we keep hearing complaints about who can vote, because its citizens decided that the government shouldn't keep track of who are its citizens and where they live. In most other countries it's the government's job to issue a photo ID to every citizen, but no, here in America that sounds too convenient and it must be some evil big-gov agenda.
Remind me which side of the Atlantic is throwing its citizens in jail for tweets?
Trump getting elected wasn’t inevitable. There were unusual events during the 2016 election campaign that could have resulted in a different outcome if their timing had been different.
What they're saying is that government lists get abused. That's true no matter who is in power.
Billionaires paid for Hillary, dems couldn't be bothered to listen to the people. Took 0 responsibility for it. Just took her campaign war chest and dumped it into a media smear campaign.
But the lists were compiled before Trump took office. Countries that have experience with totalitarianism don't make those lists to begin with.
That's why in France, for example, it's illegal for the government to keep track of people's race or religion. When the Nazis occupied France they used such documents to figure out who the Jews were.
> it's illegal for the government to keep track of people's race
We don't even have the concept of “race”.
We really don't seem to like learning the lessons of history
Countries that have experience with totalitarianism don't make those lists to begin with.
I’m pretty sure the German government has a list of people enrolled in the German socialized medical system.
Client Side Scanning tried to hash your files to help the government find any "child predators" using iPhone.
You know, the same federal government that refused to assign a special prosecutor to the Epstein files. You can rest assured Apple and the Fed are very interested in protecting the children. Anyone who refuses to allow that sort of process is probably a criminal anyways, right?
In what world is this not overreach for ICE? It is positively authoritarian.
You just know this goes beyond illegal immigrants. This is some Gestapo shit right there.
The Gestapo murdered millions. Please don’t throw around such callous and ignorant insults.
The Gestapo didn't start by murdering millions. They started by making lists.
The article states that the agreement claims compliance with a 2019 System of Records Notice, which it says allows the data to be used "to assist another federal or state agency."
The article notes that a former information security lead from the VA says the SORN needs to be updated for this specific ICE/CMS agreement and has not been. Clearly that fact is a disputed.
The ACLU argues that the sharing is only allowed if it contributes to the accuracy of Medicare or Medicaid, administers a federal health benefits program, or is necessary to implement a federally funded health benefits program. Im not sure if this it true (sharing only allowed in these cases) but if so it seems reasonable that detecting fraud would contribute to the accuracy and integrity of Medicaid. Furthermore, ICE does administer a federal health benefits program (IHSC [1]), so the basis for the ACLU's objection really seems unfounded, although the administration doesnt cite this basis and is quite upfront that its about identifying illegal aliens.
[1] https://www.ice.gov/detain/ice-health-service-corps
I personally think it's a first run for a secret police force, maybe coming as soon as next year. This will help them test the waters as well as set up facilities and training centers they can leverage later for a new stasi type force.
I attended Amazon Re:Invent a number of years ago and one of the keynote speakers was talking about providing medical information to law enforcement - the theory being that if they know you suffer from schizophrenia, for instance, the police would be informed of this and in theory less likely to murder you.
I found the whole idea very prone to abuse and posted about it on social media, and the whole thread flew into people fighting about Obamacare… but I still think I was right.
The older I get, the more I become a strong proponent of keeping data out of the hands of the people who can murder you without recourse.
Coupled with 150 billion USD for ICE, the same amount as for the Pentagon, what can go wrong?
The Pentagon’s budget is 900 billion per year. That 150bn ICE figure is over 4 years, so 37bn a year. You are wrong by a factor of 24x.
they still are giving ICE 4X the money as before to set up a first draft speedrun of a secret police force that can run around grabbing people off the street with no ID, masks on, and tossing them in white vans to imprison them without due process or court hearings and send them to 3rd world nations for indefinite internment. This is likely see if the public will stand against it.
Great, thanks for correcting the figure, my bad. The news reported 150bn for Pentagon but it appears this is just the money for a few specific projects.
That is the danger of central data collection. I know we like to pretend that federal departments are discrete units. At the end of the day the federal government owns the data. No subpoena needed if your boss already owns the data. You just have to ask nicely.
The problem is even worse when that data is in private hands. One of the most common ways the government gets data they couldn't justify subpoenaing themselves is to simply hand over cash to corporations who have already collected that data for other uses. for example: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/how-law-enforcement-ar...
I've never thought that controls prevented centralizing all our data, but incompetence and just bureaucratic bloat.
We are very, very far away from a state where the government doesn't know all about you. Im not sure what we should do about that fact. Im not simply arguing for an inevitable erosion of privacy on one end or soveriegn citizenship, for example, on the other. It's just that you would have to rewind way back. Social security, income taxes, etc.
No government agency should get access to any private data without the appropriate protocols in place. Even more so considering the many issues surrounding ICE and their actions already, this will not improve things. Let alone the moral problem of trying to deport people which have been used by American companies for cheap labour to build the nation they want and supposedly are. Now of course that is ignoring the ludicrous view that undocumented migrants are the key issue, as opposed to so many other home made issues in the US, such as unfair wealth disparity, and a lack of fundamental basic rights for citizens.
It’s not private data. It’s the government’s data.
Medical information is not government data that can just be shared.
I find it interesting that outside of the political headlines the surge in deportations remains lower than that during the Obama and Biden administrations.
Not trying to make a political statement here just pointing out oddities between reported data online perception.
Note* this data could be inaccurate ?
“ Deportation Numbers: While arrests have risen sharply, the administration's impact on actual deportation rates is still being assessed. According to the Migration Policy Institute, the Trump administration is on track to deport roughly half a million people this year, which is below the target of one million annually and less than the 685,000 recorded in fiscal year 2024 under President Joe Biden.”
that's because the border is down to like 5% of what it was. Now they have to hunt down people instead of just watching them come across the border and grabbing them by the thousands
When I played Deus Ex back in the early 2000's (now with GMDX 9), the game looked exaggerated, a blend between The X-Files and Neal Stephenson/Gibson.
It doesn't any more.
I've always felt DX was an ironically realistic vision of 2052 when you consider what the average person would be able to see.
Sure, the protagonist sees hidden bunkers with weird science, but the average person? It's hard find work, their votes don't seem to matter, there's no real privacy anymore, and nobody will honor the warranty on the little floor-cleaner robot.
TBH things like EFF and such were a reality, and the devs for sure they were aware, as they knew geeky/nerdy games like Nethack too; and deducing knowledge about free software and digital rights it's trivial.
Also, Deus Ex and the Unreal Engine had a GL renderer with worked amazingly great with Wine back in the day, it was one of the best games to run in early 00's. Yeah, the game was propietary and yadda, yadda; but there's the Surreal engine (libre implementation of Unreal1) on the works.
Another game on dystopias which looks parodical but it's heavily reality grounded it's Liberal Crime Squad. As an European I know near nil about the USA goverment branches and how the goverment it's built, but that game taught me the process exceptionally well. And, yes, it's a must play giving how current politics are going:
https://github.com/Kamal-Sadek/Liberal-Crime-Squad
It has an Augmentation system a la Deus Ex too.
"We are going to beat the swamp by adding more swamp with a stasi twist" seems to be the motto of the new regime. This isn't what MAGAs or conservatives voted for, but were warned they were going to get.
I don't understand why ICE would need access to Medicaid data. You need to be a citizen or lawful permanent resident to access that program, not to mention all the other additional criteria. The idea of illegal immigrants somehow bypassing all the checks and balances successfully en masse feels a little silly to me.
Just a quick check of the official website to try and get onto Medicaid in WA state shows that it requires a social security number and citizenship information: https://www.wahealthplanfinder.org/us/en/health-coverage/get...
They have a pamphlet available one more click away from the link you shared that gives detailed information on how undocumented immigrants can get free/reduced-cost health care, and what all of their options are: https://www.wahealthplanfinder.org/content/dam/wahbe-assets/...
This is not what the federal website for Medicaid says, though.
> I don't understand why ICE would need access to Medicaid data.
It’s a class war. Once they’ve run out of immigrants to harass and deport, they’ll be going after the poor.
They are:
- significantly raising taxes on imported goods - letting ACA subsidies expire - reducing access to medicaid - allowing medical debt on credit reports - resuming collections/garnishment for student loans - reducing options for student loan repayment / forgiveness
they're going after the poor
brown people and LGBTQ are next. It's so obvious that it hurts my brain that people can't see it.
The important thing is they go after someone.
There's something called "Qualified Non-citizens", federal funding is prohibited for non-citizens but states could optionally cover it
https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/enrollment-strategies/down...
so ultimately there is some source of non-citizen data to be gleaned
Some states have different requirements for undocumented persons. Most states permit medicaid for emergency situations. Some permit it for pregnant people.
Are there any states where Medicaid funds "emergency situations" for people who are not otherwise eligible for Medicaid? I've never heard of that. EMTALA requires hospitals to treat anyone in emergency situations, but doesn't to my knowledge provide a mechanism to pay for those treatments. The patient still gets billed and hospital likely just doesn't get paid.
My understanding from reading the federal website is that this would not be Medicaid, it would be a different program. So they would not be in the Medicaid database, right?
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A lot of states evidently give Medicaid to illegal aliens as well. ICE wants this data to track down those persons. I feel it's illegal and overreach, but Congress has turned into a rubber stamp for Trump and just sitting on their thumbs, albeit some have furrowed brows and "concerns". None of them do anything though. Congress should be the main power in Washington, not our new King in Orange.
Finding illegal family members of enrollees.
Several blue states expanded their medicaid programs to allow illegals. This was with the intention to pay for it with state dollars instead of federal dollars.
Some states even allow legal temporary visa visitors like students to sign up for their state level funded medicaid. NY is constitutionally required to do so.
ICE however is making a play to obtain all of that state level data.
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California gives medi-cal to undocumented migrants, paid for by the California general fund. The same program also administers federal medicaid funds for eligible Californians. It's a very different reality than you're trying to present.
I don't care. There are reasons we firewall private information from blanket surveillance by law enforcement. This is wrong.
The term "illegal aliens" is dehumanizing hate speech.
What bastards?! How dare they help keep those migrants that are essential for many key jobs in the US healthy?!
Lots of people with no papers buy social security numbers so they can work legit jobs- and you could presumably get benefits too. Presumably they're looking for people who don't make sense- receiving benefits in two states, live in Minnesota but get benefits in Arizona, that sort of thing.
I live in AZ and your example is awful because we're literally full up on Minnesota snowbirds 6 months out of the year.
Imagine 7000 people per day being "disappeared" for the next 1200 days
(peak covid was 3000 deaths per day)
This country is going to get really horrific, really really fast
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/gop-gives-ice-massive-budg...
> Tom Homan, as well as Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller have made very clear that they intend on spending the billions in this bill. Tom Homan said this week that they want to arrest 7,000 people every day for the remainder of the administration
> Imagine 7000 people per day being "disappeared" for the next 1200 days
lol ppl here would be singing a different tune if 7000 people per day were entering this country on H1B visa.
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> Sending people back to their homes
That is NOT what is happening: https://archive.is/20250713011900/https://www.washingtonpost...
Yeah, we're just sending them to torture camps in 3rd world African countries where they'll probably starve. Very legal, very cool.
They've asserted their authority to send people to another country that they came from, like sending people Liberia and South Sudan. So it looks like you are the one living in an echo chamber rather then reality.
I'll never understand the inclination to voice an opinion based on a reality which is easily disproved with a few minutes or googling / reading actual news. Seems like there are three options: 1) You're uninformed; 2) You're misinformed; 3) You're acting in bad faith. If (1), perhaps don't speak on a subject you know nothing about, especially a subject which is severely harming others. If (2), then you should take your own advice regarding echo chambers. Not much to say about (3) other than it is best to avoid engaging people acting in bad faith.
May I familiarize you with the Madagascar Plan? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan
The Nazis were claiming they'd deport the Jews at first. It never goes directly to death camps, it's baby steps of normalization.
> "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
- Milton Meyer, They Thought They Were Free - The Germans, 1933 - 1945
I have no problem with it. Send them back from whence they came.
You think they'll stop just before they get to you?
They are deporting babies born here and have never lived anywhere else, some taken right out of the hospital
There are kids sitting right now in cages at Alligator Auschwitz without an adult for days and days and have never known any other country
Your parents were born in this country? How about their parents?
Because now they've run out of "criminals" they are putting people with legal status ("green cards") into the concentration-camps and when they run out of those next year who do you think they are going to keep busy with?
US Citizens have sat for days in prison before even given the chance to show citizenship, why don't you think that's going to happen to you eventually?
That's not what they're preparing to do. They're building open air prisons for tens of thousands of people. It would take years to deport that many people. If they fill these things it will be a humanitarian disaster.
I wonder if you'll feel the same when they come for you once they run out of easy scapegoats.
The amount of precedent being set here for big government and overreach is amazing. I'm not really surprised though that Conservatives and other small/limited governemnt people worked to enact this massive overreach of power.
The GOP is not a party of small/limited government people. It's a party of people who want absolute control and use the language of small/limited government to gain power.
Both parties are the same. Democrats want to make it illegal to protect myself from a violent attacker, enact legislation designed to block poor people from starting businesses, buy votes by promising handouts. They are both filthy and dirty and serve corporations.
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Source?
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Well you gotta be a citizen for Medicaid, so they shouldn't find anything interesting.
Right? /s
Many poor children are on Medicaid. If you are born in the US to an undocumented person then you are a citizen and eligible for Medicaid. So they can use this info to find the undocumented parents of these kids and deport and disappear them. Then the kids have to chose between staying with their family or leaving the only country that have ever known.
Wow their parents really screwed them over.
Oh good, so they are raiding databases that predominatly contain personal information on people they aren't looking for.
From TFA:
> Medicaid, state and federally government-funded health care coverage for the country’s poorest, is largely available only to some non-citizens, including refugees and asylum seekers, survivors of human trafficking, and permanent residents. Some states, like New York, provide Medicaid coverage for children and pregnant people, regardless of their immigration status. States report their Medicaid expenditures and data to the federal government, which reimburses them for some of the costs.
The Trump admin is aggressively deporting refugees and asylum seekers who entered legally.
California provides full coverage to undocumented migrants. This is who the administration is targeting.
As a related aside, Federally-funded California clinics are about to start requiring proof of citizenship. This is causing a panic.
Also, due to the massive cost of providing care to undocumented migrants, Newsom is about to freeze all registrations for Medi-Cal (so the message is get in now before the gates close). He's also proposing charging undocumented migrants a modest premium.
States can have supplements for non-citizens that don't use federal dollars and several do.
It’s not all state dollars though. There’s a Medicaid match for ACA expansion populations. The OBBB reduces that match by 10% for states that expanded the population to include unauthorized immigrants. In Oregon, to maintain that program Oregonians are going to have to pony up hundreds of millions more per year. Much of the country is fine with that.
Nobody believes those programs isolate state and federal funds effectively.
At the very least they're using federal funds for administrative costs.
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"Illegals" can't use full Medicaid, they can only receive emergency care which hospitals are required to give by law. That's what that $4.5B figure is – emergency care, labor, delivery, etc. Furthermore, undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes each year, including the payroll taxes that fund Medicaid and Medicare. Taxpayers aren't on the hook, because these immigrants are already paying in for services they can't even use.
So they can use (expensive) emergency care but also they are paying for (cheap) services they can’t even use? That’s some interesting logic. Clearly they can and do use some of these services.
Medicaid & Medicare Fraud is a big deal.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/09/how-medicare-and-medicaid-fr...
Personally, I'm ok paying 30 bucks a year to make sure fellow human beings in the US don't die of preventable causes in our streets.
Our country is massively in debt, and healthcare fraud is off the charts currently.
We don't need more people exploiting the system.
Legal immigrants pay into the system, and do their fair share.
The illegals broadly do not support federal expenses.
> Personally, I'm ok paying 30 bucks a year to make sure fellow human beings in the US don't die of preventable causes in our streets
EMTALA forces hospitals to treat emergent conditions regardless of ability to pay/status.
But what you are talking about as "preventable causes" sounds more like chronic conditions and universalized healthcare that does not meet the definition of emergent situations.
If we deport them they won't die of preventable causes in our streets.
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Most of the time when you submit paperwork for someone that is applying for a VISA here you'll provide information from a citizen/permanent resident, so they likely want to find the person that helped/sponsored your paperwork so they can get to you. Might be a good way to find bogus Medicaid fraud and strip you from your permanent residency or citizenship or just say you're abetting a criminal (someone living here illegaly), there are plenty of uses for this data if you're evil enough.
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> unprecedented does't necessarily mean illegal or nefarious.
Right, it means at a new level which has never been seen before.
Which is accurate. The headline didn’t claim illegal nor nefarious. The headline is accurate in a literal sense.
yes but top 2 comments are this
> ICE now gobbles it all up and can use it without rules
> No government agency should get access to any private data without the appropriate protocols in place.
And my own comment above is downvoted for some reason.
Presumably if it was illegal they would use that term and 'nefarious' isn't within editorial guidelines.
I'm not sure those are the threshold for being noteworthy. A novel application of medical payment information seems worth one's attention but you don't need to click through.
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You may be on the wrong side here.
The current administration won the national, popular vote.
Post your full personal information and medical records, I suspect you of a crime.
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No, "panic" is what you feel when the American Gestapo tosses aside your Real ID and throws you in a basement without access to a lawyer.
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Not one of those agencies is disappearing people in broad daylight while being masked to hide their identities.
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