DOGE is collecting federal data to remove immigrants from their housing and jobs

The Trump administration is using personal data normally protected from dissemination to find undocumented immigrants where they work, study and live, often with the goal of removing them from their housing and the workforce.

At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, officials are working on a rule that would ban mixed-status households — in which some family members have legal status and others don’t — from public housing, according to multiple staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution. Affiliates from the U.S. DOGE Service are also looking to kick out existing mixed-status households, vowing to ensure that undocumented immigrants do not benefit from public programs, even if they live with citizens or other eligible family members.

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The push extends across agencies: Last week, the Social Security Administration 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 slashing their ability to receive benefits or work legally in the United States. Federal tax and immigration enforcement officials recently reached a deal to share confidential tax data for people suspected of being in the United States illegally.

The result is an unprecedented effort to use government data to support the administration’s immigration policies. That includes information people have reported about themselves for years while paying taxes or applying for housing — believing that information would not be used against them for immigration purposes. Legal experts say the data sharing is a breach of privacy rules that help ensure trust in government programs and services.

“It’s not only about one subgroup of people, it’s really about all of us,” said Tanya Broder, senior counsel for health and economic justice policy at the left-leaning National Immigration Law Center. “Everyone cares about their privacy. Nobody wants their health-care information or tax information broadcast and used to go after us.”

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The White House did not reply to a request for comment. In response to questions, a DHS official said, “The government is finally doing what it should have all along: sharing information across the federal government to solve problems.”

“Information sharing across agencies is essential to identify who is in our country, including violent criminals, determine what public safety and terror threats may exist, scrub these individuals from voter rolls, as well as identify what public benefits these aliens are using at taxpayer expense,” the department’s assistant secretary for public affairs said.

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President Donald Trump campaigned on promises of the most deportations in U.S. history and has moved forcefully since his inauguration to pursue that goal, including reopening family detention centers, moving migrants to the former prison for terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to expel alleged gang members without a hearing. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem has also moved to rescind temporary protected status for Venezuelans and pare back protections for Haitian migrants.

The push is more extensive than administration officials have made public, staffers across multiple federal agencies said, mostly speaking on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the policies publicly. It’s not clear whether or how a growing list of names or addresses would immediately translate into more deportations.

But the ramp-up is clearly starting. DHS had already asked the Social Security Administration for help with immigration enforcement and tracking down fraudulent use of Social Security numbers, according to a government official briefed on the matter. At the IRS, officials agreed this month to share data with DHS, which indicated it might seek to use tax information to find as many as 7 million people suspected of being in the country illegally, the Post has reported. The acting IRS commissioner resigned after the deal was signed.

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Other federal employees have raised concerns that DOGE officials are bulldozing through guardrails meant to keep information accessible to only a small number of people and used only for specific purposes. That includes information people reported months ago, not knowing how it would eventually be used.

The push to link agency data with the White House’s policy goals comes from the top. Last month, Trump signed an executive order to eliminate “information silos.” The order said the move would boost the government’s “ability to detect overpayments and fraud.”

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At HUD, Secretary Scott Turner announced an agreement in March to facilitate data sharing with DHS and ensure that taxpayer funds “are not used to harbor or benefit illegal aliens.” Turner told Fox News Digital that “those that are here illegally, that are living in HUD-funded public housing, we’re putting on notice.” He has said there are 24,000 “ineligible” people in HUD-assisted housing.

HUD knows which households include undocumented people because all applicants are required to report their status when seeking assistance. Undocumented immigrants are prorated out of the amount of assistance households receive but have been allowed to live in public housing for years. An undocumented grandparent or parent sometimes lives in public housing with other eligible family members.

The effort to locate and kick out mixed-status households is being led by Mike Mirski, a DOGE staffer at HUD who plans to target cities such as New York and Chicago first, according to one employee. The power to mine that information effectively lets Mirski “decide who is a citizen and who is not a citizen,” the employee said, adding that those decisions would be based on flawed analyses of datasets he doesn’t know how to use.

Mirski did not respond to a request for comment.

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In most scenarios, HUD does not have the authority to knock on people’s doors and remove them from housing. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement and law enforcement do. Multiple people close to the department said public housing authorities are on alert, hosting webinars and internal meetings about what to do if immigration officials arrive en masse. They often conclude they have little recourse but to call the police.

In a statement, HUD spokeswoman Kasey Lovett said that “there are tens of thousands of ‘ineligible’ individuals in HUD housing, which more than likely translates to illegal aliens.” She added that the department currently serves only 1 in 4 American families who need help.

“Secretary Turner is using every tool at his disposal to reverse the wrongdoings and negligence of the Biden administration and is making certain that under the leadership of President Trump, American citizens are the only priority,” Lovett said.

At Social Security, DOGE representatives have spent the past month seeking access to data and asking questions that would allow them to ascertain people’s citizenship status, according to two staffers with direct knowledge of DOGE’s activities who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. The team gained increasing access to claimants’ full names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, mailing addresses, contact information, bank details, and more.

In March, DOGE advisers accessed a dataset with highly sensitive personal information, including applicants’ driver’s licenses, citizenship status and various other markers collected by DHS, which it shares with Social Security under existing interagency agreements. They later asked career employees how to understand, interpret, and use Social Security data and wage data. Specifically, the staffer said, the data would permit DOGE officials to identify individuals who are working in the country without a Social Security number, a strong indication of illegal status.

Career staffers fielding the DOGE team’s questions grew increasingly uncomfortable. Employees asked themselves, “Is it better to try to mediate and correct from the inside, knowing that we are aiding them in an effort to track down noncitizens?” the staffer said. “Or is it better to wipe our hands clean of it, knowing they’re going to do it anyways but in a way that is likely to impact a greater number of people — some of whom very well could be citizens?”

The issue became moot on March 21 when a judge temporarily forbade DOGE team members from accessing sensitive Social Security data, leading the agency to boot all DOGE representatives from its systems. But in the days since, DOGE members have repeatedly asked to get back inside the datasets, which would be in violation of the court order, according to a staffer and records obtained by the Post.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Social Security said that it would work with DHS to “use all the tools available, including using data exchanges to their fullest potential, to protect all Americans.”

At the Education Department, officials are also seeking information that could be used to help immigration authorities find people to deport.

In February, the administration opened investigations into whether five universities properly handled allegations of antisemitism. Education Department political appointees told the attorneys handling the cases to ask the schools for the names and nationalities of protesters against Israel’s war in Gaza, according to documents and three attorneys with the Office for Civil Rights who have direct knowledge of the situation, and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the cases publicly.

The move appears to echo a plan laid out in an essay in the Washington Examiner in December by Max Eden, then a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and now a White House official. The essay suggested that the department’s civil rights office could find “the identities of every single foreign student who supported the protests,” and then immigration authorities could “revoke every single one of the protesting foreign students’ visas.”

Asked why the department was seeking the data on protesters and whether it related to immigration, Craig Trainor, the Education Department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, said the information was necessary to assess how the universities handled the antisemitism cases. His statement did not directly address the question of deportations.