The Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda is continuing apace, as is the White House’s plans related to self-deportation — in effect, making immigrants’ lives on American soil so miserable that they’ll voluntarily choose to leave the country.
As my MSNBC colleague Ja’han Jones explained, this reached a new level last week when Team Trump began cancelling immigrants’ lawfully obtained Social Security numbers — essentially listing individuals as dead — “as a means to impede their ability to make money or access government services and to pressure them to leave the country.”
The Washington Post reported that administration officials confronted objections from the Social Security Administration but ignored them while adding “thousands of immigrants ranging in age from teenagers to octogenarians to the agency’s Death Master File.” From the report:
Experts in government, consumer rights and immigration law said the administration’s action is illegal. Labeling people dead strips them of the privacy protections granted to living individuals — and knowingly classifying living people as dead counts as falsifying government records, they said. This is in addition to the harm inflicted on those suddenly declared dead, who become unable to legally earn a living wage or draw benefits they may be eligible for. Social Security itself has acknowledged that an incorrect death declaration is a “devastating” blow.
Devin O’Connor, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told the Post, “This is an unprecedented step. The administration seems to basically be saying they have the right to essentially declare people equivalent to dead who have not died. That’s a hard concept to believe, but it brings enormous risks and consequences.”
And if we were to stop here, it would already be a timely reminder of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant radicalism. But his team’s legally dubious tactics on self-deportations are just one piece of a larger ugly puzzle.
For example, the U.S. Supreme Court directed the administration to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the White House mistakenly sent to a prison in El Salvador, but Trump’s Justice Department declared over the weekend that it’s not required to work with El Salvador’s government to make this happen. As my MSNBC colleague Jordan Rubin explained, it’s “hard to square” Team Trump’s stance with the justice’s directive.
Around the same time, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that the United States has also sent 10 more people to El Salvador, to be housed in a prison called the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). Rubio claimed that the deported people were gang members, but the White House has made related claims before, and to date, the administration has made no meaningful effort to bolster the allegations with evidence.
Or put another way, we don’t yet know whether there are any additional gay makeup artists among those sent to CECOT. Meanwhile, an American lawyer in Massachusetts named Nicole Micheroni received a message from the government last week, telling her to leave the country, despite the fact that she’s an American citizen. “Probably, hopefully, sent to me in error,” she told the NBC affiliate in Boston, referring to the notification. “But it’s a little concerning these are going out to U.S. citizens.” Have other Americans received similar notices? Will other Americans receive similar notices? Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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