Lawfare Daily: Social Security, the ‘Death Master File,’ and Immigration Enforcement

The Lawfare Podcast

The Lawfare Institute

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4.7 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 2 May 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

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Summary

As the Trump administration seeks to escalate its immigration crackdown, the government has turned to a concerning source of information for data on immigrants: the Social Security Administration. Reports indicate that Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative and the Department of Homeland Security successfully pushed Social Security officials to provide access to what’s commonly known as the “Death Master File,” allowing the government to mark living immigrants as dead in the Social Security Administration’s systems. The goal, according to press reports, is to make the lives of these individuals so difficult that they choose to leave the country.

What exactly is the Death Master File, and why is this strategy so alarming? To understand, Lawfare Senior Editor Quinta Jurecic spoke to Kathleen Romig, Director of Social Security and Disability Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and Devin O’Connor, a senior fellow at the center. They explained the unsettling implications of tinkering with the Death Master File and situated these efforts within the broader scope of the Trump administration—and DOGE’s—repeated attacks on Social Security.

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0:00.0	The following podcast contains advertising.
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0:11.5	patreon.com slash lawfare. That's patreon.com slash lawfare.
0:18.2	Also, check out Lawfare's other podcast offerings, Rational Security, Chatter,
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1:29.2	Are they claiming for themselves the ability to mark someone as dead,ly who hasn't died.
1:37.7	And I think that's where the sort of, you know, the specifics of it aren't nearly as important in some ways as just that one bare fact.
1:40.0	It's the Lawfare podcast.
1:49.0	I'm senior editor Quinta Jurecic here with Kathleen Romick and Devin O'Connor of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
1:59.7	When we say that we're worried about the Social Security Administration weaponizing the Deathmaster File against political enemies, that's not just a dark fantasy.
2:01.7	That's something that they've proven that they are willing to do and that they did do against Governor Mills. We're talking about the Trump
2:06.6	administration's reported efforts to wield data from the Social Security Administration as a
2:12.6	tool of immigration enforcement. We're here to discuss what I think is one of the stranger and frankly more
	...

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