Immigrants Aren’t Dead, But Social Security Adds Them To Death Database
By adding more than 6,000 immigrants to the death file, the Trump administration is cutting off their access to Medicaid, Medicare, and other programs, The Washington Post reports. The administration is using this tactic to force people to leave the U.S., with plans to reclassify more people in the future.
The Social Security Administration this week entered the names and Social Security numbers of more than 6,000 mostly Latino immigrants into a database it uses to track dead people, effectively erasing their ability to receive benefits or work legally in the United States, according to four people familiar with the situation and records obtained by The Washington Post. The move, requested by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem, is aimed at putting pressure on the undocumented immigrants to leave the country, according to a White House official. (Rein, Natanson and Sacchetti, 4/10)
The Department of Homeland Security has enlisted the FBI and other law enforcement agencies in recent weeks to conduct welfare checks on children and young people who came to the United States without their parents, alarming advocates who worry it鈥檚 an effort to target them for deportation or scare them. President Donald Trump has long accused his predecessor of losing more than 300,000 migrant children, claiming that they are now 鈥渟laves, sex slaves or dead,鈥 though many also arrived during the president鈥檚 first term. Immigration experts have said that most of those children have been safely reunited with their parents or relatives in the United States. (LeVine, Sacchetti, Roebuck, Loennig and Nakashima, 4/10)
President Donald Trump鈥檚 orders haven鈥檛 targeted research involving evolution, but the authors鈥 unease about publishing reflects uncertainty in the science world. (Johnson, 4/10)
The privately held company Deployed Resources has made billions running tent detention facilities to hold immigrants entering the U.S. at the border. Now it is cashing in again on Trump鈥檚 plan to hold immigrants before deportation. (Ernsthausen, Rosenberg and Asher-Schapiro, 4/11)