Trump Team Wanted to Force Immigrants Out by Declaring Them Dead

The Trump administration had plans to falsely declare 2.7 million people dead as part of the president’s cruel mass deportation efforts, The Washington Post reported Friday.

A 49-page whistleblower disclosure reviewed by the Post detailed how the White House plotted to add the names and Social Security numbers of millions of living, breathing people to the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File, or DMF, which is used to track when a person has died and should stop receiving government benefits.

Whistleblower Jeremiah Schofield, who worked at the Social Security Administration for 25 years before leaving in October, told the Post that he’d refused to implement the plan. Schofield said that when he pulled a sample from the 2.7 million names, he found that all of the people marked for death were still alive. Agency lawyers had warned that falsely marking someone as dead could violate federal law, and Schofield realized that the plan’s purpose was to terrorize immigrants.

Schofield described one meeting in which a DOGE official revealed the goal of such a cruel plan: to make immigrants so miserable that they would self-deport or try to visit a Social Security office, where they could be arrested.

“That call was one of the most disappointing calls I’ve been in in my 25-year career,” Schofield told the Post. “I was shocked. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”

The Trump administration previously moved more than 6,000 immigrants to the DMF last year.

Being wrongly moved to the DMF can have far-ranging effects, as people will no longer be able to access their bank accounts or use their credit cards. The SSA’s website says that the effects of being wrongly included in the DMF can be “devastating to the individual, spouse, and dependent children.”