Trump's Migrant Hunt Digs Into the IRS and Social Security

The deal allows ICE to request the tax return information of migrants who are not in this country legally. In recent days, as part of a push to encourage self-deportation, the Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration have also coordinated to strip benefits from otherwise inadmissible migrants granted parole during the Biden administration – a group posing national security concerns who have now had their parolee status revoked.

“Information sharing across agencies is essential to identify who is in our country, including violent criminals," an unnamed senior DHS official told ABC News, while stressing the desire to “determine what public safety and terror threats may exist so we can neutralize them, scrub these individuals from voter rolls, as well as identify what public benefits these aliens are using at taxpayer expense.” 

Past administrations have largely avoided such information sharing, both because of turf-protecting impulses and privacy concerns. In the current climate, several immigrant advocacy groups have sued to thwart cooperation between the IRS and Department of Homeland Security, claiming that they are likely to violate taxpayer confidentiality laws. The critics assert that the new policy is aimed not at legitimately prosecuting individuals, but at identifying migrants as part of an effort to deport them en masse – or to pressure them into leaving on their own.

The controversy highlights the sometimes novel ways in which the Trump administration is seeking to break down walls between agencies to share data in pursuit of its policy goals – whether to combat illegal immigration, streamline government, or ensure election integrity – and resistance has come both from outside groups and from within the federal bureaucracy itself.

As RealClearInvestigations reported in 2022, the IRS and its partners, including the Social Security Administration, have been reluctant to share information with agencies like DHS pursuing non-citizens, in part on privacy grounds. The IRS has neglected to use its own enforcement powers, evidence suggests, because of a view that the benefits to working illegal migrants – in their tens of billions of dollars in tax contributions annually – outweigh the costs to Americans victimized by identity theft by migrants using their stolen Social Security numbers.

But the Trump administration has pledged to mine and modernize the government’s data systems to eliminate “information silos” and help combat waste, fraud, and abuse.

The Social Security Administration is ground zero for these efforts. Millions of non-citizens have been issued Social Security numbers in recent years after entering the country and being legally authorized to work. The Trump DHS said in a January 2025 statement that the “Biden-Harris Administration abused the humanitarian parole program to indiscriminately allow 1.5 million migrants to enter our country.”

This month, DHS revoked the temporary parolee status of over 6,300 migrants either on the FBI’s terror watch list or with FBI criminal records. The federal government had issued all of them Social Security numbers. The Trump administration asserted that hundreds of them were collecting Medicaid. Dozens were also receiving unemployment insurance. Some obtained student loans.

On April 8, the Social Security Administration rendered this group ineligible for benefits and legal employment. It moved them to an internal “Ineligible Master File” – previously known as the “Death Master File,” since it contained rolls of dead former beneficiaries.

The Trump administration acted despite internal pushback, including from a senior Social Security IT official who appears to have been forcibly removed from his position in light of his opposition.

“President Trump promised mass deportations, and by removing the monetary incentive for illegal aliens to come and stay, we will encourage them to self-deport,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston told RCI. “He is delivering on his promise he made to the American people.”

Some 92,000 additional illegal migrants with criminal convictions but with Social Security numbers reportedly make up the next group to be shifted to the Ineligible Master File.

Former Biden administration Social Security Administration head Martin O’Malley expressed outrage. “If without due process, Trump and [Elon] Musk can unlawfully ‘disappear’ or ‘digitally murder’ anyone who legally entered our country, then they can do it to anyone already legally here,” said the former Maryland governor.

O’Malley’s acting successor at the Social Security Administration, like her IRS counterpart, left the agency in February amid efforts by DOGE to access “sensitive government records.”

During a recent interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, Elon Musk and DOGE staffers suggested that they are also seeking to root out the massive fraud they believe plagues Social Security. Musk’s colleagues said 40% of phone calls to Social Security offices come from fraudsters trying to change direct deposit information to steal legitimate recipients’ funds. They also said that they had found that millions of people listed as over the age of 120 were marked as alive within the Social Security database, affirming 2023 findings from Social Security’s inspector general. Reports and independent analyses suggest at least a percentage of the dead have been issued Social Security benefits.

The X owner on loan to the federal government says fraudsters have exploited the fact that government “databases don’t talk to each other.” As an example, Musk said some seek disability or unemployment insurance using the Social Security number of a person marked as living in the Social Security Administration’s systems but actually dead. Such fraud “is happening all the time at scale,” he asserted.

Social Security’s inspector general reported around $72 billion in “improper payments” over the period from 2015-2022. DOGE has reported that some 1.3 million non-citizens issued Social Security numbers during the Biden years were enrolled in Medicaid. Only certain classes of non-citizens may be eligible for such benefits.

The government efficiency agency has also identified nearly $400 million in fraudulent unemployment claims since 2020 – though it is unknown if any significant portion of these claims went to non-citizens.

In March, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order, limiting DOGE’s efforts to access Social Security Administration data, asserting that it was “essentially engaged in a fishing expedition … in search of a fraud epidemic.” On April 17, the judge granted the plaintiffs a preliminary injunction prohibiting DOGE members from accessing Social Security systems or records containing personally identifiable information – a ruling the Trump administration has indicated it will appeal.

The White House has argued that while federal law prohibits illegal migrants from obtaining taxpayer-funded benefits, “numerous administrations have acted to undermine the principles and limitations directed by the Congress through that law.” Such benefits in turn serve as a “magnet” for and “fuel” illegal immigration in the administration’s view. 

Consequently, on April 15, President Trump issued an executive order, building on a prior order “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Open Borders,” aimed at “Preventing Illegal Aliens from Obtaining Social Security Act Benefits.” Such benefits include not only Social Security, but Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and myriad other social programs.

A recent analysis by Center for Immigration Studies shows that 59% of households headed by illegal immigrants use at least one welfare program – and are “especially likely to receive food benefits and Medicaid relative to native households.”

The Trump administration released a fact sheet in conjunction with its latest order citing a study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform indicating that taxpayers spend “at least $182 billion annually to cover the costs incurred by the presence of 20 million illegal aliens and their children, which includes $66.4 billion in Federal expenses plus an additional $115.6 billion in state and local expenses” – vastly outweighing their contributions including through paying taxes.

The order directs all impacted agencies not only to take relevant measures to ensure ineligible aliens are not receiving benefits, but also to prioritize civil or administrative enforcement actions – while beefing up the full-time fraud prosecution teams across such agencies in conjunction with the Justice Department. The order also calls for the Social Security Administration to investigate earnings reports for those 100 or older with names mismatching those on file at the administration and, when warranted, to refer matters to relevant law enforcement agencies.

The Earnings Suspense File

A major area of Social Security fraud pertaining to immigration is found in the agency’s Earnings Suspense File.

This file records the earnings of employees whose W-2 wage and tax statements have names and Social Security numbers that do not match official records. For decades the file was relatively small and mostly included women whose names had changed with marriage. That change followed the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which required those seeking employment to fill out I-9 forms attesting to citizenship or work-authorized immigrant status, and to provide corroborating documentation and a valid Social Security number.

This effort failed to deter masses of illegal immigrants from entering the country and working – in turn contributing billions of dollars to entitlement programs in tax dollars, but doing so through stealing or fabricating Americans’ Social Security numbers, including those held by the elderly and children. The Social Security Administration estimated two decades ago that up to 75% of illegal migrants working on the books used fake or stolen Social Security numbers.

A 2018 Treasury inspector general report documented more than 1.3 million cases of employment-related identity theft from 2011-2016, and, in 2017 alone, 1.2 million cases in which illegal migrants used Social Security numbers that belonged to someone else or were fabricated. 

Reflecting this identification theft, the total amount of wages recorded in the Earnings Suspense File rose from under $80 billion in the 1980s to nearly $190 billion in the 1990s and then multiplied tenfold over the ensuing two decades, to $1.9 trillion in wages by the end of the first Trump administration. During the Biden years, as millions of additional illegal migrants entered the country, that number would again surge upwards to $2.3 trillion by September 2024. 

For comparison with those numbers, workers all told generated $9.2 trillion of earnings taxable under Social Security – up to the individual maximum of $147,000 – during 2022, the latest year available.

Boon or Bane?

Some see the work of illegal migrants as a major boon to the economy. In a June 2024 report, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, which favors an “equitable and sustainable tax system,” estimated that in 2022, some 10.9 million illegal workers generated $373 billion in earnings, and paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes. The Federation for American Immigration Reform, an advocate for limited immigration, has challenged that analysis, and presented its own, indicating that a far higher estimated illegal migrant population of 15.5 million as of early 2022, earning lower wages than the competing analysis suggested, generated a net cost to taxpayers of $150.7 billion annually. 

The Center for Immigration Studies’ Steven Camerota has testified before Congress that illegal migrants “tend to earn modest wages and make modest tax contributions even when income and payroll taxes are taken out of their pay. This fact, coupled with the relatively heavy demands they make on public coffers – especially for education, health care, and means-tested programs – is the reason they are a net fiscal drain.”

These figures do not take into account the costs to those whose identities have been stolen by illegal immigrants working off the books.

In a recent interview, Trump administration Border Czar Tom Homan acknowledged the problem. “We know for a fact illegal aliens use Americans’ Social Security information to apply for jobs,” he said. Homan asserted that his wife had had her number stolen by an illegal migrant, hurting her credit. 

In response to questions about whether immigration authorities would be making use of Social Security information to target illegal aliens for deportation, Homan replied that they should: “This is about protecting the American taxpayer, protecting their Social Security information. 

“We’re protecting Social Security for the people who deserve it, for the people who paid into it for decades. We need to protect it for those that need it, and those who are authorized to receive it.”

The White House, Social Security Administration, DOGE, and the Treasury Department did not respond to RCI questions about whether they are examining the Earnings Suspense File to identify potential illegal migrants for pursuit in workplace enforcement activities. 

Workplace Enforcement Called Key

The Social Security Administration did not say whether it would be restarting the process of issuing “no-match” letters to employers, indicating mismatched records between W-2s submitted and Social Security Administration records. The first Trump administration had issued such letters, but the Biden administration curtailed the practice, and generally eschewed workplace enforcement of immigration laws.

Proponents of the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans believe workplace enforcement is key to any such efforts. Ronald Mortenson recently wrote for the Center for Immigration Studies that “removing millions of individuals illegally in the United States … can only ultimately be accomplished by large-scale workplace enforcement actions that identify large numbers of illegal aliens and lead to their deportation, that eliminate jobs for illegal aliens by holding employers accountable, and that encourage illegal aliens to voluntarily leave the United States.” He has argued DOGE and the Social Security Administration can facilitate these efforts by identifying fraudulently obtained and used Social Security numbers.

Tracking Illegal Voting

DOGE has reportedly used Social Security Administration information to help the Trump administration’s efforts to ensure non-citizens are not participating in U.S. elections. Antonio Gracias, a top DOGE official deployed to the Social Security Administration, recently revealed that of more than 5 million non-citizens to receive Social Security numbers during the Biden years, not only were 1.3 million on Medicaid, but thousands were registered to vote, and some had voted – based upon DOGE’s investigation of the records of just a few states. The administration, Gracias said, had made criminal referrals. DOGE did not respond to RCI’s inquiries.

In a March 25 executive order, the Trump administration instituted a series of measures designed to ensure that only citizens vote in federal elections, while also calling on the Homeland Security Secretary to grant state and local officials access to federal databases for verifying the immigration status of those registering to vote or who have already been registered; to, in coordination with DOGE, review state voter rolls and cross-reference them with federal immigration databases and request relevant state records to identify foreign nationals registered to vote and to share such names with state or local election officials; and for the attorney general to “prioritize enforcement” of laws punishing non-citizen registration and voting, including through use of relevant federal and state databases.

As RCI has previously reported, many states historically lacked access to federal databases for ensuring their voter rolls are free of non-citizens – in part due to the alleged reticence of the Homeland Security Department.

The administration’s critics have not only cast doubt on DOGE’s findings of fraud and questioned the intent of the administration’s associated policies, but sought to challenge the efforts to unearth them in court as illegal. Plaintiffs have challenged DOGE’s ability to access systems and data at agencies ranging from the Treasury Department to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Personnel Management.

Generally, they characterize such officials as unqualified if not separate and apart from the government – and therefore unauthorized to access the sensitive data contained in government databases, including under the Privacy Act.

In a representative response to one such suit, the Trump administration replied that it was facing “a spate of similar lawsuits seeking unprecedented judicial micromanagement of the Executive Branch’s ability to share government data with its own employees in exercising politically accountable oversight of agency activities.”

The administration boiled the arguments on the other side of many such cases down to this: “that it is unlawful for one employee of a federal agency to provide access to its data systems to another employee for the purpose of carrying out an Executive Order of the President.”