Social Security tried to assign fake death dates to 2.7M people: Whistleblower
A whistleblower has filed a complaint with Congress claiming the Social Security Administration is trying to fake death dates for 2.7 million people living in the United States as a way to send immigrants back to their home countries.
Former Social Security worker Jeremiah Schofield in question Department of Government Efficiency was then run by billionaire Trump supporter Elon Musksuccessfully forced the agency to assign death dates to 6,000 people. He also claims that the Department of Homeland Security asked the agency to mark an additional 2.7 million people as dead.
Assigning the date of death and moving it to the Social Security death master file means immediate loss of access to bank accounts, health insurance, and credit cards. This could also mean mortgages being foreclosed, legal immigration status being revoked, and American citizens losing their right to vote.
The Social Security Administration said in a statement to USA TODAY that it “did not add a list of 2.7 million names to the Death Master File. SSA maintains the highest level of internal controls. This includes ensuring that all appropriate policies and procedures are in place to maintain the integrity and accuracy of agency records.”
Details of the allegations were confirmed by Schofield’s lawyer. Schofield worked at the agency for 25 years and led IT modernization efforts. It doesn’t know whether 2.7 million people were ultimately marked as dead.
Thousand Oaks, California office of the Social Security Administration.
“Jeremiah witnessed Trump Administration officials admit to deliberately targeting individuals they had no reason to believe were actually dead in order to remove them from Social Security records and, ultimately, the country,” said Debra S. Katz, one of the attorneys representing Schofield.
Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. Social Security Administration Commissioner Frank Bisignano and three former DOGE employees outlined the allegations on June 6 and asked for more information.
According to their letter, Schofield alleged that a DOGE employee told them that “these individuals’ lives would be ruined…and they would be forced to ‘deport themselves’” or “have to go to a local Social Security office, at which point SSA field office staff would send them to DHS offices,” where officials would “detain them for deportation.”
According to Schofield’s statement, the sample test conducted on only 25 of the 2.7 million names he was asked to mark as dead revealed that the majority were US citizens or legal permanent residents.
This article first appeared on USA TODAY: DOGE forced Social Security to fake death dates: Whistleblower
