By
The Trump administration’s relentless campaign to dehumanize immigrants has taken a bureaucratic turn, as new reports reveal a grim effort to extend that dehumanization to official records.
The New York Times was first to report on the administration’s cancellation of immigrants’ lawfully obtained Social Security numbers — essentially listing individuals as dead — as a means to impede their ability to make money or access government services and to pressure them to leave the country.
According to the Times:
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 more easily spend money.
According to the Times, the administration has added more than 6,300 names to the “death master file,” claiming those immigrants are convicted criminals and “suspected terrorists.” But given the administration’s dubious allegations of criminality in other recent proceedings, no one should feel confident in the government’s ability to differentiate immigrants who’ve committed crimes from those who haven’t.
The effort to place immigrants on the death master file has also been reported in outlets like The Washington Post, CBS News and The Guardian. (MSNBC has not yet verified these reports.) This reported move is yet another chilling example of the Trump administration working to erase some immigrants from American life — an administrative abuse that now stands alongside nabbing people off the streets and shipping them off to a foreign prison. It also tracks with Trump’s racist portrayals of immigrants as sub-human, or as grifters who deplete public resources.
For the record, many states already forbid immigrants from receiving Social Security benefits and other federal programs, despite the fact immigrants’ tax dollars help keep these programs afloat. As Marco Guzman, a senior policy analyst at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, explained for The Hill:
Undocumented immigrants help fund teacher salaries, road and bridge repairs and other local quality-of-life improvements. They also pay into vital programs that make up our social safety net (including Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance) even though they will likely never see any benefits from these programs — because, in most circumstances, they are legally prohibited from accessing them. This is in addition to being barred from important federal credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit and, in some cases, the Child Tax Credit.
Making it harder for immigrants to work — as canceling their Social Security numbers does — potentially worsens the worker shortage already associated with Trump’s anti-immigrant policies. But the president and his administration are hellbent on making immigrants feel unwelcome, and they seem willing to accept any degree of economic self-harm if it means they can demonize and dehumanize noncitizens.