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 cancelling 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Earlier this week, the names of more than 6,300 migrants whose legal status had just been revoked were added to the file, according to the documents.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 authorisation.

Their “financial lives”, Leland Dudek, the Social Security Administration’s acting commissioner, wrote in an email to staff members, would be “terminated.”

The move is the latest in an extraordinary series of actions by the Trump administration, pushed by Elon Musk and the department of government efficiency to harness personal data long considered off limits to immigration authorities in order to advance President Donald Trump’s vision for a mass migrant crackdown. This week, several top officials at the Internal Revenue Service moved to resign after the tax agency said it would help locate undocumented immigrants.

In another previously unreported development, Dudek in February reached an agreement with the department of homeland security that would provide the last known addresses of 98,000 people to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency responsible for deporting undocumented immigrants, other documents and interviews show.

New York Times News Service