- calendar_today August 13, 2025
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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced a new national effort Tuesday to increase oversight of public insurance programs and remove illegal immigrants from Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). The initiative, CMS officials told reporters on a call Monday night, is one of several immigration enforcement measures taken by the Trump administration since President Donald Trump’s second term began in January.
CMS will start sending enrollment reports to all states beginning Tuesday, officials said. The monthly reports will contain information about Medicaid and CHIP enrollees that cannot be verified in federal databases that track immigration and citizenship status. The list of federal databases includes the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program.
CMS will distribute a new report each month, officials said. States will be responsible for reviewing the cases each month and then reporting back to CMS with the outcome of each case. If the person is in the country legally, they will remain in the program. If the person is in the country illegally, they must be removed.
“This is just the latest action we’re taking to strengthen the integrity of public benefits programs and ensure these critical programs are serving the people who are legally eligible to receive them,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement.
CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz added in a statement: “Our actions help to prevent fraud, waste, and abuse by making sure every dollar is going to those who are eligible under the law. We have the backs of the American taxpayers, and we’re committed to making sure our benefits go to the people who need them and are eligible for them.”
In addition to the new verification system, CMS will also start imposing financial penalties against states that do not remove illegal immigrants from Medicaid or CHIP after they have been flagged. Under the new CMS policy, non-compliance will trigger a financial penalty based on the state’s overall Medicaid expenditures. The financial penalty kicks in if a state does not remove an ineligible enrollee from Medicaid or CHIP within 30 days of receiving the report.
Protecting safety-net health programs like Medicaid and CHIP from illegal immigrants has been a long-running conservative priority. After Trump’s second term began in January, his administration has taken a series of steps to try to strengthen eligibility requirements for federal benefit programs. One of Trump’s first executive orders this term, for instance, instructed all federal agencies to review public benefit programs and take steps to ensure they were not providing benefits to non-citizens in violation of a 1996 law known as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.
A few weeks after issuing the executive order, the Department of Health and Human Services added several new federal programs to the list of public benefits subject to verification and eligibility checks. The list expanded from 31 programs to 44, requiring all the newly added programs to be subject to eligibility checks as well.
CMS Begins Effort to Kick Illegal Immigrants off Medicaid, CHIP
CMS has been sending signals to states about immigration eligibility requirements for public health insurance programs for several weeks, but Tuesday’s report is its first major enforcement effort to date. Since President Trump’s second term began in January, CMS has been working to increase immigration eligibility checks at the state level. It also required states to use the federal electronic portal to verify the immigration status of each Medicaid or CHIP enrollee.
Under the terms of the new mandate, state agencies will have to reconcile all of the enrollees’ information, including their citizenship and immigration status, with the information available in federal databases. If any discrepancies are found, the state agency must take steps to verify the enrollee’s information or take steps to remove the person from the program.
