Trump Wants to 'Terminate' Legal Immigrants' Social Security Numbers (2025)

Donald Trump has taken extreme measures in his second term to deport foreign nationals legally residing in the U.S., such as revoking the visas of students involved in pro-Palestine protests on campuses around the country. Now, as The New York Times reports, the administration will look to widen the scope of its attacks on immigrants by canceling their Social Security numbers.

The idea is to make it impossible for immigrants to work or access banking services — even though they came here legally — in hopes that they will be forced to self-deport. The Social Security Administration (SSA) plans to accomplish this by adding names to its “death master file,” marking living individuals as dead and removing them from the system. The agency’s acting commissioner, Leland Dudek, explained in an email to staff that their “financial lives” would thus be “terminated.” Approximately 6,000 mostly Latino immigrants have already been pronounced dead by the SSA at the request of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, according to The Washington Post.

And, according to Times, the “death master file” scheme isn’t the only way the SSA has cooperated with Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. It also reached an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to hand over the last-known addresses of 98,000 people to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Supposedly, the targets of these moves include “suspected terrorists” and convicted criminals — though as Trump’s mass deportation of migrants to a mega-prison in El Salvador has demonstrated, the administration hardly bothers to justify these categorizations. About 90 percent of those prisoners have no criminal record, and ICE and DHS appear to have based their spurious claims about alleged gang affiliations on unrelated tattoos and clothing. Authorities have also admitted to sending one person to the prison in El Salvador due to an “administrative error.” The conservative-dominated Supreme Court today ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” that man’s release, in a unanimous decision.

Similar errors are likely to arise as the Social Security Administration starts to rescind credentials from thousands of people. But it’s just part of a sweeping and unprecedented effort to weaponize data from agencies formerly considered apolitical. Several top Internal Revenue Service officials resigned this week after the agency signaled that it would use tax documents to help the Trump administration identify immigrants to be deported.

Tech oligarch Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency are heavily involved in this allegedly illegal ransacking of sensitive information from the administrative state, accessing this material through federal IT systems and feeding it into AI models for analysis. Needless to say, that software isn’t infallible — and Musk himself seems committed to misreading and distorting whatever his team finds. The world’s richest man has trashed Social Security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” baselessly claimed that undocumented migrants are receiving benefits, and, at a rally in Wisconsin last month, argued that President Joe Biden had allowed an increasing number of noncitizens to receive Social Security numbers.

But the program of automatically assigning Social Security numbers to immigrants authorized to work in the U.S., Enumeration Beyond Entry (EBE), began in 2017 under Trump. The program doesn’t entitle noncitizens to receive Social Security benefits — it was designed to let noncitizens with legal status start paying into the program without visiting a SSA field office to obtain a number. The current Trump administration has partially frozen the EBE deal, meaning many work-authorized immigrants (and newly naturalized U.S. citizens) will need to visit one of those offices, which have been ravaged by DOGE-imposed staff cuts and closures, in order to get a Social Security card.

More broadly, DOGE appears to be gathering personal data on hundreds of millions of Americans, not just immigrants, presumably in violation of the PrivacyAct of 1974, enacted after Watergate to prevent the abuse of private personal information by government officials. For Trump, who promised “retribution” in the closing days of the 2024 election, access to these records could enable all manner of revenge against perceived enemies. Already, federal workers have come to believe that DOGE is spying on their internal communications, perhaps with the aim of purging anyone disloyal to Trump.

The machinations afoot at the Social Security Administration alone reveal how easy it is for the White House to inflict harm on swaths of people with little regard for who is actually lumped into those groups or why. They also raise the question of what other phony pretexts the administration might invent to declare a person — citizen or not — effectively nonexistent. For an institution established to keep older and disabled Americans out of poverty, it’s about as far from the original mission as you can get.