ICE using Social Security records to aid Trump push to deport illegal immigrants
The Social Security Administration (SSA) has become the latest government agency to join President Donald Trump’s deportation push, showing the president’s whole-of-government approach to keeping a key campaign promise.
“This is the Trump administration using every tool it has in its toolbox to crack down on illegal immigration,” Tom Jones, the executive director of the American Accountability Foundation, told Fox News Digital.
The comments come as the SSA sifts through the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who are in the country under “temporary parole” status that was granted during the Biden administration and allowed those migrants to have Social Security numbers in order to work.
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Trump administration officials claim that more than 6,300 of those people are on the FBI terrorist watch list or have FBI criminal records, according to a report from Axios.
The SSA began moving the names of those migrants on the terrorist watch list to its “Death Master File,” its current database of dead people, the report notes, adding that the agency has since moved those names to the “Ineligible Master File.”
The move to tap the SSA comes as Trump has used every resource at his disposal to continue his deportation push, coming after the president used military forces to help secure the border and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to begin cross-checking information for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE).
But not everyone has been fully on board with Trump’s aggressive push, with the IRS and ICE partnerships leading to the resignation of IRS Acting Commissioner Melanie Krause last week.
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Similar scenarios could play out at the SSA, with some of the agency’s staff expressing concern over the data-sharing agreement.
“Some agency staff have since checked the names and Social Security numbers of some of the youngest immigrants against data the agency typically uses to search for criminal history and found no evidence of crimes or law enforcement interactions,” some staffers told the Washington Post.
Jones believes the defections are an example of why Trump’s shakeup of the federal workforce is long overdue.
“The fact that IRS leadership resigned over cooperating with ICE shows exactly why there needs to be a concerned effort to ensure that the federal workforce is composed of leaders who are willing to implement the president’s agenda,” Jones said. “For every three senior officials who resign, there are dozens of civil servants below the radar screen who are in place and still able to obstruct the president’s agenda.”
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Nevertheless, Jones expects Trump to continue using whatever resources possible to make good on his immigration agenda.
“The Social Security Administration is just one example. I suspect we will also see places like OSHA, which has staff on job sites, using their inspectors to target illegal alien workers and the businesses that employ them,” Jones said. “This administration has been waiting years to deploy an aggressive America First playbook they built during four years in the wilderness.”