During his third campaign trail that eventually led him back to the White House, President Donald Trump pledged to carry out the "largest deportation operation" in U.S. history, promising to remove millions of immigrants living in the country without legal status.
Trump's plan included mobilizing the military to help achieve his goal of deporting 1 million people in a single year. But a new report by The Washington Post suggests the administration also explored a more unconventional tactic.
The newspaper reported that administration officials considered classifying 2.7 million living people, including U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents, as deceased in government records, Jeremiah Schofield, a former senior Social Security Administration executive, told the Post.
The executive said the proposal was never implemented and ultimately abandoned. Had it been carried out, it could have effectively cut affected individuals off from the financial system, including wages, banking services, government benefits and other essential services.
Schofield, who spent 25 years at the Social Security Administration before leaving the agency in October, said he refused to help implement the plan after agency attorneys warned officials that falsely declaring living people dead could violate federal law.
Schofield told the Washington Post he became concerned about the legality of the proposal after reviewing a sample of 25 people included in the 2.7 million-person database and finding that the majority were alive. According to Schofield, the list included U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, teenagers and senior citizens.
On June 4, Schofield submitted a 49-page document to the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations describing how officials with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) sought to use Social Security data in connection with the proposal. DOGE was created by Trump and Elon Musk to identify government spending cuts.
In an interview with the outlet, Schofield said he decided to speak publicly about the plan because he believes Americans should understand how government data can be misused.
Although the administration did not move forward with the broader proposal, officials later pursued a similar effort on a smaller scale. Last year, according to the report, 6,100 immigrants were added to the agency's Death Master File for the same purpose.
"If you're on the [Death Master File] you can't have a bank account, you can't get credit, so no apartment, no way to save money, no way to get paid, no way to get on insurance or carry health insurance," a former Social Security official who spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity said. "It has a ton of devastating effects."
The document also describes efforts by DOGE officials to gain access to sensitive government databases. During one meeting, Schofield recalled a DOGE official assigned to the Department of Homeland Security describing a strategy aimed at making immigrants' lives so difficult that they would either leave the country voluntarily or seek assistance at Social Security offices, where they could potentially 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 Post noted that a court filing last month said the Trump administration had revoked DOGE members' access to the data as of the beginning of 2026 and that the Social Security Administration had no plans to restore that access.
© 2025 Latin Times. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
