The Trump administration is reportedly looking to cut off thousands of immigrants from crucial financial services as part of a bid to drive them out of the country.
The government has been adding thousands of migrants whose legal status was freshly revoked to the Social Security Administration’s “death master file,” effectively canceling Social Security numbers they obtained legally and blacklisting them from a key form of identity, according to six sources and documents reviewed by The New York Times.
The “financial lives” of migrants would be “terminated” under the move, acting SSA Commissioner Leland Dudek reportedly told staff in an email.
The agency has renamed the death database as the “ineligible master file,” but because it has not yet developed a new way to mark people as ineligible for benefits, immigrants are being given dates of death, according to the Times.
White House spokesperson Elizabeth Huston told the newspaper that the changes would help advance President Donald Trump’s long-promised immigration crackdown.
“President Trump promised mass deportations, and by removing the monetary incentive for illegal aliens to come and stay, we will encourage them to self-deport,” she wrote in a statement. “He is delivering on his promise he made to the American people.”
Earlier this week, DOGE engineer Aram Moghaddassi reportedly sent Dudek a list of 6,300 migrants identified by the Homeland Security Department as having temporary legal status but were either placed on a “terrorist watchlist” or tagged as having “FBI criminal records.”
The list reportedly included a 13-year-old and seven other minors, raising fears within the SSA that the effort was overly broad.
“Immigration enforcement is not within the scope of the Social Security Administration,” Jason Fichtner, a former senior SSA official, told the newspaper. “The potential for errors can be very consequential.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem reportedly wrote Dudek a Monday memo indicating the plan would “prevent suspected terrorists who are here illegally” from having “privileges reserved for those with lawful status,” without specifying how the administration was identifying these supposed terrorists.
Dudek also agreed in February to work with Homeland Security in handing over the last known addresses of 98,000 people to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to 12 sources who spoke to The Times.
This makes the SSA the latest agency to make the controversial move of cooperating with ICE.
The Trump administration recently lost its third Internal Revenue Service chief—who quit after just a month in the position—following the agency’s decision to hand over immigrants’ tax data to ICE.
Melanie Krause, who became IRS acting commissioner at the end of February, reportedly learned about the deal from a Fox News report.
“She no longer feels like she’s in a position where she can impact the decision-making that’s happening,” a person familiar with the situation told The Washington Post. “And [she believes] that some of the decisions that are being made now are things the IRS can never recover from.”
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