July 22, 2026
Delete means delete… right?
ICE shared Medicaid data it wasn't supposed to have with Palantir
Data was supposed to be deleted, but commenters say the real scandal is nobody believes that
TLDR: Court filings say Medicaid data that should never have reached ICE was also shared with Palantir, and officials later admitted copies still existed after saying it was deleted. Commenters are split between outrage over privacy, cynicism that nobody will face consequences, and a bitter fight over immigration and double standards.
The official story is already a mess: government health officials wrongly handed over Medicaid data to immigration authorities, and court filings now say that data was also passed to Palantir, the company helping power an ICE tool that shows where people live. A judge had already said some limited sharing was allowed, then paused things after officials admitted they shared way too much — including data on refugees, legal residents, and even some U.S. citizens. Then came the truly cursed sequel: officials said the data was deleted, only to later discover more copies were still floating around. And yes, commenters absolutely pounced.
The biggest mood in the thread was pure "you expect us to believe that?" energy. One commenter mocked the idea that deleting a file from a Microsoft Teams chat counts as deletion at all, basically saying, that’s not how computers work, babe. Others went full doom-scroll, arguing privacy laws seem to hit ordinary people but magically soften when government agencies and giant contractors are involved. The darkest hot take? A shrugging, cynical "So what is anyone going to do about it?" that captured the thread’s exhaustion.
But the drama didn’t stop at privacy. The comments split into a full-on values fight: some were furious that the government broke its own rules, while others tried to pivot the debate toward whether undocumented immigrants should receive aid in the first place. Then came the spiciest accusation of all — that people only hate Palantir when it helps the wrong side. In other words: data scandal, legal chaos, and a comments section doing its absolute best impression of a Thanksgiving argument gone feral.
Key Points
- •Court filings say ICE shared improperly obtained Medicaid data with Palantir after CMS had transferred the data beyond what a court order allowed.
- •The disputed Jan. 7 dataset reportedly contained information on millions of people, including individuals who were legally in the United States.
- •Judge Vince Chhabria paused CMS-to-ICE data sharing for immigration enforcement purposes after federal officials acknowledged overbroad transfers.
- •A later government filing said CMS inadvertently reshared the same dataset, and ICE subsequently found additional retained copies among several users.
- •The Department of Justice is seeking broader authority for ICE to access Medicaid data on a wider category of noncitizens while Democratic attorneys general argue ICE has not shown it can properly secure the data.