To Up Pressure, Administration Lists 6K Migrants as Dead

The Trump administration has turned up the pressure on people in the US legally on work permits to leave by adding more than 6,000 of them to Social Security's "death master file." The idea of listing the immigrants with the dead is to keep them from having bank accounts and credit cards, or access government benefits, or do anything else that requires a Social Security number check, the Washington Post reports. "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," a White House spokesperson said in a statement.

The action is part of an effort driven by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency to use personal data previously untouched by immigration officials in a mass operation against migrants, per the New York Times. A DOGE software engineer sent the first names to the Social Security Administration, whose acting commissioner emailed the staff that the immigrants' "financial lives" will be "terminated." Several top Internal Revenue Service officials plan to quit over administration pressure to use protected tax records in deportations, per the Times.

Trump officials maintain that the first 6,300 people put on the death list are convicted criminals or "suspected terrorists," though they didn't provide evidence of that. They said the strategy might later be used against people in the US without authorization. Some current and former Social Security officials said placing the names of people the agency knows aren't dead in the death database is a violation of privacy laws, per the Post. (More Trump administration stories.)