President Donald Trump continues to find new fronts in his attacks on non-citizens.
The Trump Administration moved this week to cancel Social Security numbers held legally by some non-citizens to encourage “self-deportation.”
The New York Times reports that DOGE engineer Aram Moghaddassi sent Acting Social Security Administration commissioner Leland Dudek a list of 6,300 individuals suspected by Homeland Security officials of crimes on Tuesday, and the agency promptly placed them on the “death master file,” a document logging deceased Social Security beneficiaries.
Dudek wrote in an email obtained by the Times that the plan would “terminate” the “financial lives” of those targeted.
Confirming the reporting, White House spokesperson Elizabeth Huston told the Times the rollback would “[remove] the monetary incentive for illegal aliens to come and stay” and “encourage them to self-deport” in a statement.
The action marks an escalation in the administration’s positions against many in the United States lawfully, including immigrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti who legally obtained their Social Security numbers and work authorization from the Biden Administration.
Lawful permanent residents came under attack last month when Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Department of Homeland Security claimed the authority to cancel a student demonstrator’s green card without due process. DHS officials detained Mahmoud Khalil on Rubio’s assessment that his presence undermined a “foreign policy objective.”
