'Drastic': Social Security ordered to declare migrants dead so they'll 'self-deport'
President Donald Trump is planning a strange new legal maneuver to try to force migrants with legal protected status to leave the country, reported The New York Times on Thursday: order the Social Security Administration to declare them dead.
Specifically, the Trump administration "is taking drastic steps to pressure some of those immigrants and others who had legal status to 'self-deport' by effectively canceling the Social Security numbers they had lawfully obtained, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with six people familiar with the plans," reported Alexandra Berzon, Hamed Aleaziz, Nicholas Nehamas, Ryan Mac, and Tara Siegel Bernard. "The goal is to cut those people off from using crucial financial services like bank accounts and credit cards, along with their access to government benefits."
The way they are doing this is to add these migrants to the "death master file," a database that, as the name implies, has historically just been used to keep track of deceased people's Social Security numbers so they can't be used fraudulently to claim benefits or open up lines of credit in their name.
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When the Social Security Administration adds someone to this database, the credit reporting agencies also mark that person as deceased, which effectively prevents that person from ever using that Social Security number to open a bank account or take out a loan or a credit card. It can also block someone from collecting government benefits or, in some cases, applying for professional licenses.
Historically, people who have been listed in the Death Master File by mistake have faced devastating financial consequences.
At the moment, only migrants convicted of crime or who are "suspected terrorists" are having their Social Security numbers declared dead — but "officials said the effort could broaden to include others in the country without authorization," said the report.
The policy is part of a broad-based push to eliminate the rights of noncitizens and their families, which also includes mass deportation operations with no due process. The administration is also seeking to redefine birthright citizenship for American-born children of noncitizens out of the Fourteenth Amendment, which is currently winding its way through the courts.