this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2025
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Officials let ICE access health data to locate migrants, alarming experts who warn of civil rights and health risks

Medicaid officials have reportedly made an agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to allow agents to examine a database of Americans’ personal information – including home addresses, social security numbers and ethnicities.

The data sharing agreement will allow Ice to find “the location of aliens”, according to an agreement obtained by the Associated Press. Medicaid is the nation’s single largest health insurer, providing coverage for 79 million low-income, disabled and elderly people.

“This is about the weaponization of data, full stop,” said Pramila Jayapal, a Democratic US representative from Washington state, who has worked extensively on US healthcare, in a statement on social media.

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[–] b_tr3e@feddit.org 9 points 1 week ago (3 children)

The original sin was storing things like "ethnicity" in the database at all. What does ethmicity have to do with health?

[–] hypnicjerk@lemmy.world 24 points 1 week ago (1 children)

a lot, lol. minority groups often have different medical needs than the majority, and ignoring those differences leads to worse outcomes for them. from a research perspective especially it's critically important.

[–] theparadox@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

There are reasons to store race/ethnicity. One that is relevant to almost any scenarios is tracking discrimination.

[–] fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Honestly, and people will argue in this thread that "actually there are some trends". No, not really. Race as always is a shit ass way to categorize people. Income has a tighter correlation for most things. What about genetics conditions they ask? Track fucking genotypes then. What about phenotypical conditions like melatonin correlation to sun burns? Again, that singular fucking attribute does a better job as measure the thing that fucking matters!

What doesn't do that is the social construct based on the most visable phenotypes associated with a region in the world over 200 hundred fucking years ago!!

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

race is important for medical. it's not just a social construct.

Chloroquine was used for many years to treat malaria but it was found dangerous to give to people of African and Arabic descent.

I don't believe it's used anymore, but it's an example of environment directing genetic behavior at the cellular level.

we are all indeed the same species, but there are varying degrees of medical reasonings for tracking race and gender.

that said, it's important that these agencies that house citizen information stand equal to in power to other branches of government in order to protect citizens information and services provided.

[–] fruitycoder@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago

Africa is a continent. What they found some peoples found in the southern Mediterranean regions had a shared reaction. To then go "Africans should avoid..." Is to do massive disservice to the practice of medicine.

No meaningful concept of race is used, so it is in fact meaningless. You might be able to group people into hundreds of haploid groups. But white, black, yellow, red, Asian, European, African, Native American, is so broad to be not just useless but actively harmful by providing misinformation as facts.