.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on Tuesday announced a new effort to crack down on public health insurance programs by weeding out illegal immigrants in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, CHIP.

CMS officials confirmed the broad, nationwide effort to The Well News, and said it would be the first in a series of similar measures aimed at bolstering enrollment eligibility. It is the latest in a series of steps the Trump administration has taken during his second term to ensure taxpayer-funded public assistance programs are only used by legal residents and citizens.

The plan, as described by CMS officials, will see the federal agency begin sending monthly enrollment reports to states starting Tuesday. Each state will be sent a report identifying Medicaid or CHIP enrollees whose immigration or citizenship status could not be confirmed through federal databases. These databases will include those of the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE.

The first of these reports went out Tuesday, a CMS spokesperson said. The agency plans to send monthly reports throughout the remainder of the year and will require each state to review the cases flagged in its own report and report back to CMS about each case.

“States must work with CMS to verify eligibility or disenroll the individual,” the agency said.

CMS officials say the reports will close a “loophole” in which illegal immigrants or others with pending citizenship claims were sometimes able to enroll despite those claims being pending. In each case, state Medicaid agencies are required to verify eligibility, either affirmatively or by removing the person from the rolls.

“We are tightening oversight of enrollment to safeguard taxpayer dollars and guarantee that these vital programs serve only those who are truly eligible under the law,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a statement.

CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz similarly said the effort was designed to protect the integrity of the nation’s safety-net health programs. “Every dollar misspent is a dollar taken away from an eligible, vulnerable individual in need of Medicaid and CHIP,” Oz said in a statement. “This action underscores our unwavering commitment to program integrity, safeguarding taxpayer dollars, and ensuring benefits are strictly reserved for those eligible under the law.”

It is the latest of several moves the Trump administration has made in his second term to more strictly enforce eligibility for benefits in Medicaid, CHIP, food stamps, and other public programs. The effort to push the states to be more aggressive on Medicaid and CHIP comes after President Donald Trump, in one of his first executive orders of his second term in February, ordered all federal agencies to look for ways to cut access to benefits for illegal immigrants.

Trump’s directive, signed on Feb. 18, noted in particular that illegal immigrants were receiving benefits “in contravention of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act,” a Republican effort to limit such access. Several weeks later, the Department of Health and Human Services expanded the list of what types of government programs were considered “public benefits.”

The administration in January also began blocking illegal immigrants who use Medicaid from accessing abortion care through that program. After the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services sent a directive to states on that issue in January, the Biden administration is expected to reverse that policy.

CMS Increases Data Sharing, Makes States Share More Data

The announcement on Tuesday comes in the middle of a heated political fight over how to use data in public health programs. On May 5, federal judge Miriam Un ruled in a lawsuit by several groups that the Department of Health and Human Services must stop sharing Medicaid data on enrollees with immigration authorities.

A U.S. District Court judge ordered the Trump administration to stop the practice of sharing Medicaid data with ICE.

The court has ordered the department to stop providing data on all Medicaid enrollees to immigration authorities. For its part, HHS had been seeking to hand over data on “suspected undocumented immigrants” but has so far refused to comply with the court’s order.

In addition to the court fight, states are now also facing new obligations on data sharing as part of a Republican spending package that was passed last month. That bill has an enforcement provision requiring states to conduct eligibility verifications on Medicaid recipients at least twice a year.

To sign up for our newsletter, subscribe to our RSS feed.