Social Security classifies thousands of immigrants as dead, as part of Trump crackdown

The Social Security Administration this week entered the names and Social Security numbers of more than 6,000 mostly Latino immigrants into a database it uses to track dead people, effectively erasing their ability to receive benefits or work legally in the United States, according to four people familiar with the situation and records obtained by The Washington Post.

The move, requested by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem, is aimed at putting pressure on the undocumented immigrants to leave the country, according to a White House official.

Among the people being targeted are immigrants who have bona fide Social Security numbers but have lost their legal status in the U.S., such as those who entered under one of the Biden administration’s temporary work programs that have since ended.

The White House official — who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the new program — said those who were moved into the Social Security database this week all have ties to terrorist activity or criminal records. The official did not provide evidence of the alleged crimes or terrorist ties but said some are included on the FBI’s terror watch list.

“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,” Elizabeth Huston, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. “He is delivering on his promise he made to the American people.”

The immigrants’ names were placed in the database following two memorandums of agreement signed Monday by Noem and Leland Dudek, the acting Social Security commissioner, according to the people familiar with the situation. The memos authorize Social Security to place the immigrants in the death file for national security reasons and under the Social Security Act, one official said. Some details about the program were first reported Thursday afternoon by the New York Times.

But some current and former Social Security officials questioned the legality of the practice, saying that adding names of people that the agency knows have not died to the death database violates privacy laws that no longer apply when someone has actually died. Like others interviewed for this article, the current and former officials spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

The action marks the start of a major campaign by the Trump administration to force out potentially hundreds of thousands who are living in the U.S. illegally but who have a Social Security number, allowing them to collect Medicaid, Medicare, unemployment insurance, federal loans or other benefits, the people said. The next target for inclusion in the database will be 92,000 undocumented immigrants with some kind of criminal conviction, the White House official said, but the effort will expand to undocumented immigrants without criminal histories after that.

The Social Security press office did not respond to a request for comment. The White House official said that, among the approximately 6,000 people transferred to the death database, almost 1,000 are collecting benefits through Medicaid, the federal health insurance program for low-income people; 41 are collecting unemployment insurance; and 22 are receiving student loans.

“They have no right to be in the country,” the official said. Listing the immigrants in the database means they will now be treated as dead by many federal agencies, employers, landlords and banks, the official said. The administration hopes that when the immigrants realize their ability to legally earn a livelihood is cut off, they will choose to leave the country on their own.

The tactic — using Social Security’s death database as a deportation tool — marks a new strategy and an escalation in the Trump administration’s aggressive campaign to track down and force undocumented immigrants out of the country. Earlier this month, Homeland Security reached an agreement with the Internal Revenue Service to receive the tax data it maintains for undocumented immigrants. The acting IRS commissioner resigned over the decision.

“If you want to know what DOGE is doing at Social Security, this is it,” the White House official said, referring to Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team, which has been charged with downsizing federal agencies. With little evidence, U.S. DOGE Service representatives have argued that U.S. taxpayers have for years funded costly benefits for immigrants living in the U.S. illegally.

Until this month, DOGE was focused on cutting staff and spending at Social Security, as well as rooting out alleged fraud by shrinking phone service — an idea DOGE abandoned after an outcry. But the Musk team’s work on immigration intensified last week, when Social Security received a database of 800,000 people with final deportation orders kept by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a Homeland Security agency.

Some on the DOGE team pushed to revoke the Social Security numbers of a larger group, whether or not they had criminal records, two people with knowledge of the discussion said. But after several conversations, the decision was made to start with those with criminal records and alleged connections to terrorists for inclusion. The names are on a newly created “ineligibility list” that designates them as ineligible for federal benefits. The plan is to expand the database by adding anyone with a Social Security number who the administration has designated as in the country illegally.

The database that the approximately 6,000 people have been transferred to is known as the “Death Master File,” though none of them are dead. The dataset contains more than 85 million records of deaths dating to 1936. Their inclusion in the list will render the immigrants easily identifiable by many different benefit-paying entities as well as banks and identity-authentication companies.

The consequences for the group could be dire, current and former Social Security staff warned. In a March blog post, the agency itself said that being “erroneously reported as deceased to Social Security can be devastating” and “cause financial hardship.”

As Trump officials race to deport those here illegally or whose temporary legal status the administration has canceled, it has embraced aggressive and unconventional tactics. Since taking office, Trump officials have sought to expand the government’s power to expel migrants without a court hearing, forcibly removed hundreds of immigrants to jails in El Salvador and the Guantánamo Bay naval station in Cuba, and conscripted other agencies to arrest immigrants despite their inexperience with immigration laws. The administration has also mistakenly deported a Maryland man to an El Salvador prison and accidentally told some Ukrainians to leave the country, a message officials quickly retracted.

A number of agency employees said the move to add living people to the death database is shocking and unprecedented. One noted that being placed in the death database would immediately terminate Social Security benefits and that, even for those not receiving payments, it will lead to problems with employment.

The death list is shared by Social Security with other federal agencies, and the Commerce Department also sells a regularly updated list to banks, mortgage companies and employers who use it to ensure that Social Security numbers have not been stolen. That means that the Commerce version of the death database will erroneously report that the immigrants have died, potentially leading institutions to sever relationships with them, current and former Social Security officials said.

That’s because the death database is often connected to E-Verify, a Homeland Security website that allows businesses to check whether their employees are eligible for work in the U.S., the employee said.