‘Devastating’: Trump admin marks thousands legally ‘dead’ to stop them from making money
Carl Gibson, Alternet, 4/22/25
Approximately 6,000 immigrants who are legally in the United States will now no longer be able to do anything that requires a Social Security number.
The Washington Post recently reported that President Donald Trump’s administration has since moved thousands of predominantly Latino immigrants to the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) “Death Master File,” even though all of them are still alive. But with this move, these legal immigrants will be counted among the roughly 85 million Americans the SSA has categorized as dead since 1936. And according to the Post, they will be “never be able to do anything in the U.S. that requires a Social Security Number check ever again.” This includes earning a paycheck from a job, receiving disability payments, opening a bank account, turning on utilities and other basic necessities.
According to the Trump administration, the immigrants who have been added to the death database had ties to terrorist activity or had criminal records. However, it provided the Post with no proof to back up its claims, other than saying that some of the names of the people it legally categorized as “dead” were on the FBI’s terror watch list. White House spokesperson Elizabeth Huston said that the move was done as a means of incentivizing the migrants to remove themselves from the United States.
“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,” Huston said. “He is delivering on his promise he made to the American people.”
The approximately 6,000 people added to the “Death Master File” all came to the U.S. through a program offered by former President Joe Biden’s administration that granted temporary work permits to immigrants who didn’t have visas, which included hundreds of thousands of people. Trump cancelled that program, putting those migrants in legal limbo. And the group of 6,000 people officially became “dead” according to the federal government following the issuance of a memorandum signed by both Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and acting SSA commissioner Leland Dudek.
The SSA itself wrote of the dangers of being wrongfully declared “dead” in a blog post last month, saying the “financial hardship” from being added to the database by mistake can be “devastating.” Several agency employees anonymously told the Post that the decision to put living people in the death database was “shocking and unprecedented.” The idea to do so apparently originated from Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, according to an unnamed White House official
“If you want to know what DOGE is doing at Social Security, this is it,” the official said.