Pressuring Migrants to 'Self-Deport,' White House Moves to Cancel Social Security Numbers

Source: NYT

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Now, the 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.

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 effort hinges on a surprising new tactic: repurposing Social Security’s “death master file,” which for years has been used to track dead people who should no longer receive benefits, to include the names of living people who the government believes should be treated as if they are dead. As a result of being added to the death database, they would be blacklisted from a coveted form of identity that allows them to make and spend money.

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Their “financial lives,” the Social Security Administration’s acting commissioner, Leland Dudek, wrote in an email to staff, would be “terminated.”

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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/us/politics/migrants-deport-social-security-doge.html

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The article also says that back in February, Dudek.agreed to give the last known addresses of nearly 100,000 people to ICE. Social Security had never shared this much data with ICE before.

SSA has renamed the death list the "ineligible master file" but hasn't figured out a way to add people who aren't dead to the file, so they're inventing dates of death for them.