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Since taking office, the Trump administration has moved aggressively to revoke the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were allowed into the country under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Now, the administration is taking drastic steps to pressure some of those immigrants and others who had legal status to “self-deport” by effectively canceling the Social Security numbers they had lawfully obtained, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with six people familiar with the plans.
The goal is to cut those people off from using crucial financial services like bank accounts and credit cards, along with their access to government benefits.
The effort hinges on a surprising new tactic: repurposing Social Security’s “death master file,” which for years has been used to track dead people who should no longer receive benefits, to include the names of living people who the government believes should be treated as if they are dead. As a result of being added to the death database, they would be blacklisted from a coveted form of identity that allows them to make and more easily spend money.
Earlier this week, the names of more than 6,300 migrants whose legal status had just been revoked were added to the file, according to the documents.
The initial names are limited to people the administration says are convicted criminals and “suspected terrorists,” the documents show. But officials said the effort could broaden to include others in the country without authorization.
Their “financial lives,” Leland Dudek, the Social Security Administration’s acting commissioner, wrote in an email to staff members, would be “terminated.”
Many changes at the Social Security Administration are being driven by Elon Musk, who has spouted unfounded conspiracy theories about fraud perpetrated by undocumented immigrants, and about the agency sending billions of dollars to dead people. Mr. Trump has picked up many of those claims.
The billionaire, a top adviser to Mr. Trump, has also said without evidence that Democrats used the agency to grant immigrants Social Security numbers, making them eligible for benefits that kept them in the United States so they could shift the country’s demographics.
Trump administration officials have targeted both programs. The program allowing migrants to fly in is scheduled to end this month — and with it legal status for migrants already here, pending court challenges. Trump administration officials have also begun to revoke the parole of migrants who entered with the app.
The White House official said that nearly 1,000 of the migrants had received federal benefits worth a total of roughly $600,000 before their parole was cut off, including Medicaid, unemployment insurance and federal student loans — an average of $600 per person.
The Social Security agency’s death list is one of its most important data sets. Officials maintain it by collecting death records from state health records, funeral homes and family members, with roughly three million new death reports added each year. That prevents improper payments from going out.
Those who have been put on the list mistakenly while still alive have reported calamitous effects, such as having their homes foreclosed and bank accounts canceled. In order to be removed, they have to go to field offices to try to prove their identity, a process known internally as “resurrection.” But even then the problem can take months to fix, or longer.
The repurposing of the death list, as well as the agency sharing addresses with immigration authorities, could face challenges under the federal tax and privacy laws that govern the maintenance of Social Security data, according to former officials and agency experts.
Trump officials have said that they want to modernize the nation’s deportation system by combining sets of data held by different agencies that have long been siloed, part of a broader effort to link personal data about the public scattered across the government.
Documents reviewed by The Times show that DOGE is playing an important role in that process, including in the agreement to share addresses that was struck in February.
ICE collects as much information as possible to target, surveil and detain undocumented immigrants, although addresses in their records can sometimes be outdated.
Mr. Dudek gave permission to DOGE engineers and ICE leaders to use his agency’s data for law enforcement, the documents show. Michael Russo, the Social Security Administration’s former chief information officer and a member of Mr. Musk’s team, also asked for the information to be sent to D.H.S. urgently.
Neither agency would confirm if the data had been sent.
Social Security regulations state that the agency may disclose information for law enforcement purposes in certain circumstances, including when a person has been indicted or convicted of “violent crimes,” and to investigate entitlement fraud.
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