.

WASHINGTON — CMS announced on Tuesday that all state Medicaid programs and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) will soon begin receiving monthly enrollment reports with data on recipients whose immigration or citizenship status could not be verified through federal records. According to federal officials who first reported the decision, the lists could help states investigate the eligibility of illegitimate beneficiaries for the taxpayer-funded health insurance programs and ensure noncitizens without a legal status are removed from the rolls.

CMS will cross-check enrollment records with databases maintained by the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program to identify beneficiaries without confirmed status. The first report was shared with the states on Tuesday, the agency said. In the coming weeks, each state will receive its own report. Officials there will then be required to conduct reviews and report their findings to CMS.

“This action will improve oversight of these programs, protect federal taxpayer dollars, and help ensure they are available to all those who are eligible under the law,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement.

CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said in a separate statement that his agency is also “holding every state accountable for ensuring our safety-net health programs are operating as intended.”

“In an era where federal agencies are expected to take greater responsibility in mitigating and preventing fraud, waste, and abuse, CMS has taken a critical step to provide better oversight and ensure that public dollars go to those who are eligible,” Oz said.

Immigration eligibility issues

The CMS move is part of an ongoing effort by the Trump administration to address illegal immigration and fraud issues in all federal benefit programs. In his first executive order of his second term in February, Trump ordered all federal departments to review current benefit programs and submit a report on the benefits that noncitizens should not be receiving under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, a 1996 welfare law that defined the term “public benefit.”

The order was followed by another in which HHS expanded the number of programs considered public benefits under the law, going from 31 to 44. CMS, for its part, announced in March that it would soon be sending the new enrollment reports to states. In that same month, HHS began to issue a new regulation requiring states to share information on Medicaid and CHIP beneficiaries with ICE, the federal agency tasked with deporting unauthorized immigrants.

The new CMS reports were initially reported by Politico. They come as the Trump administration has clashed with several Democratic-led states over Medicaid eligibility, an issue that federal courts recently agreed with the states.

Lawmakers Push Back

The announcement by CMS on Tuesday, which the agency said would better ensure that only those eligible for the programs are using them, is just one of several moves that Republicans in Washington have taken to ensure that illegal immigrants are not receiving taxpayer-funded benefits.

Last month, the Trump administration began sharing information with ICE on Medicaid and CHIP beneficiaries to allow for deportation. States had been required to cross-reference their enrollment databases with records at the Department of Homeland Security, and the administration said the information would help ICE track down ineligible recipients of the programs. The action was quickly blocked by a federal court, which ruled that the Trump administration was overstepping its authority by sharing information with ICE without going through proper procedures.

The move came just one day after a coalition of more than two dozen Democratic attorneys general sent a letter to CMS and HHS officials questioning the legality of Trump’s proposed changes to the Medicaid program.

“The federal action that would require verification of immigration status for a broad range of federally funded public benefits is unprecedented and unauthorized,” the attorneys general wrote. “Requiring states to verify immigration status for the purposes of determining eligibility for federally funded public benefits has no statutory basis and is illegal.”

States and federal agencies are now also under a statutory deadline to begin conducting the checks on Medicaid enrollees as part of a Republican spending package that was passed last month. The deal requires that the checks take place at least twice per year, up from the previous mandate of once every two years.

CMS Begins Effort to Verify Immigration Status of Medicaid, CHIP Enrollees

Federal agencies were given until Aug. 31 to begin the work, though Democrats have expressed some concern that some Republican states have not yet done so. Several states have made “extraordinary efforts to keep Medicaid as accessible as possible to vulnerable individuals and families,” James said, citing California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Michigan, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, and Washington.

CMS began sending the new reports to state Medicaid agencies and CHIP on Tuesday, one agency official said.

“In an era where federal agencies are expected to take greater responsibility in mitigating and preventing fraud, waste, and abuse,” Oz said in a statement, “CMS has taken a critical step to provide better oversight and assure that public dollars go to those who are eligible.”

In addition to requiring states to check the citizenship status of Medicaid applicants, the new rules would also require that states submit to federal agencies the names and addresses of individuals who have been removed from the rolls. The new requirements have been the subject of a lawsuit brought by the state of California and other Democratic-led states.

In a separate deal passed earlier this month, the House and Senate passed a rule requiring federal agencies to verify the identity of all Medicaid applicants, including those who are not citizens, before enrolling them. The rule applies to all new applicants for Medicaid, including those whose Medicaid eligibility is being reviewed for the first time.