The Trump administration had plans to classify 2.7 million living people — including some U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents — as dead as part of its immigration enforcement efforts, according to a former senior Social Security executive.
The previously unreported plan, which the Social Security Administration said was not carried out, would have used one of the government’s most consequential identity databases to effectively erase people from the financial system, potentially cutting them off from wages, banking, government benefits and other services.
Jeremiah Schofield, who worked at Social Security for 25 years and helped lead the agency’s IT modernization efforts before leaving in October, said he refused to help implement the plan after agency lawyers warned that falsely marking living people as dead could violate federal law. Schofield said he realized the plan’s possible intent — to intimidate and worsen the finances of immigrants — as well as its potential unlawfulness after taking a sample of people from the 2.7 million and discovering they were all alive. Some were U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, teenagers and senior citizens, including one widow who was a legal permanent resident receiving survivor benefits.
Schofield has provided details on the plan in a 49-page whistleblower
disclosure to the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which was reviewed by The Washington Post. The disclosure offers the most detailed account yet of how officials from Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service sought to use Social Security data in service of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
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