A former senior Social Security Administration executive told the Washington Post that the Trump administration planned to classify about 2.7 million living people, including some U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents, as dead, as part of its immigration-enforcement effort.
Marking a living person “dead” in the SSA's master death file, a tactic the administration had earlier used against some immigrants, effectively erases them from financial life: it can cancel Social Security numbers, freeze bank accounts, and cut off access to credit, wages, and benefits, with the aim of pressuring people to “self-deport.” According to the whistleblower, the plan would have swept in millions of people, and its scale, along with the inclusion of citizens and legal residents, alarmed agency officials.
The Post describes the plan as among the most aggressive proposed uses of the SSA's data for immigration enforcement, turning a federal records system built to track the deceased against the living. The account is the whistleblower's; it describes a plan rather than a completed action, and the administration's earlier, narrower use of the tactic against some immigrants is documented.
The whistleblower, former SSA executive Jeremiah Schofield, said a DOGE official, private-equity investor Jon Koval, told him the goal of “killing off” the 2.7 million was to make their lives unlivable so they would either self-deport or show up at a Social Security office to prove they were alive, where ICE could detain them. When Schofield pulled a sample of 25 names to check, he found many were alive, including U.S. citizens, green-card holders, teenagers, and an elderly widow receiving survivor benefits. Schofield refused after SSA lawyers advised that falsely marking living people as dead would likely be illegal, and the plan was shelved; the administration has since said in court filings that it revoked DOGE employees' access to SSA data.