People hold signs during a protest against cuts made by Trump's administration to the social security, in White Plains, New York, March 22, 2025. (Photo by Reuters)
Washington, April 12 (RHC)-- U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is set to classify more than 6,000 living migrants as dead, cancelling their social security numbers in order to make them unable to work, and ultimately get them to leave the country.
A social security number is a unique nine-digit number issued by the federal government to U.S. citizens, permanent residents and temporary working residents and used for various official and identification purposes including tracking earnings.
The move will also make it impossible for those affected to use banks or other basic services where social security number is a necessity. It is part of Trump’s effort to crackdown on immigrants who entered the United States under programs instituted by the US president’s predecessor Joe Biden.
Sources familiar with the ramifications of the policy said earlier this week that Trump intends to move the immigrants’ names and legally obtained social security numbers to a database that federal officials use to track the deceased.
The U.S. officials also said stripping the immigrants of their social security numbers will deprive them of many financial services and force them to “self-deport.” It is unclear how the 6,000-plus immigrants were chosen. But Trump has targeted people who entered the U.S. under Biden-era programs, using a mobile app developed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Since January 2023, more than 900,000 people were allowed in the U.S. after using the CBP One app to schedule appointments with immigration officials and apply for asylum.
On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revoked the legal status of the immigrants who used that app. Those affected had been authorized to remain in the U.S. for two years while awaiting their cases to be heard. They are now expected to "self-deport."
Meanwhile, a federal judge said on Thursday that she was stopping the Trump administration from ordering hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans with temporary legal status to leave the country later this month.
The U.S. Social Security Administration has refused to confirm that living immigrants were being classified as dead. A United States federal law known as Privacy Act -- which governs the collection, maintenance, use, and dissemination of personally identifiable information about individuals -- allows the Social Security Administration to disclose information to law enforcement in limited circumstances, which includes when a violent crime has been committed or other criminal activity.
The DHS and the treasury department signed a deal this week that would allow the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to share immigrants’ tax data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) for the purpose of identifying and deporting people deemed to be illegally in the United States.
The agreement will allow Ice to submit names and addresses of immigrants inside the US to the IRS for cross-verification against tax records. The acting IRS commissioner, Melanie Krause, who had served in that capacity since February, stepped down over that deal.
In March, a federal judge temporarily blocked a team charged with cutting federal jobs and shrinking the government, led by tech tycoon Elon Musk, from social security systems that hold personal data on millions of Americans, calling their work a “fishing expedition.”
Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, an advocacy group that has challenged various Trump administration efforts in court, said her organization will sue over the social security numbers, once more details become available.
“This president continues to engage in lawless behavior, violating the law, and abusing our systems of checks and balances,” she said.
[ SOURCE: REUTERS ]
