The Trump administration is facing serious criticism after refusing a federal judge’s request to allow the acting head of the Social Security Administration (SSA) to testify about a highly controversial immigration tactic.
At the heart of the issue is a secretive project under an agency called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), created by Trump.
This project reportedly added over 6,000 living migrants to the “death master file,” a list that’s normally used to stop benefits for people who have died.
By doing this, their Social Security numbers were canceled, cutting them off from key services like banking, jobs, healthcare, and government aid.
These migrants were legally staying in the U.S. but had their status revoked under Trump’s immigration crackdown. According to The New York Times, this move was aimed at pressuring them to “self-deport.”
The judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander of Maryland, asked the administration to bring in acting SSA Commissioner Leland Dudek for testimony.
But on Monday, government lawyers declined, saying they would rely on existing records and past briefings instead of allowing him to speak.
Judge Hollander had made it clear that she wanted Dudek’s input to understand inconsistencies between what the administration was doing and what had been reported publicly.
She pointed out that the official SSA record didn’t match Dudek’s earlier statements, especially regarding the use of the death master file.
The lawsuit was filed in February by national labor groups and grassroots organizations.
It accused DOGE and the Trump administration of giving unauthorized access to millions of Americans’ personal information in the SSA database — a potential violation of privacy laws.
This is just one of several legal battles against DOGE since Trump launched it. Critics, including the judge, say it is being used to go after immigrants based on false claims of Social Security fraud. Hollander even said that DOGE was acting like it was on a “fishing expedition.”
Former SSA official Tiffany Flick, who was Dudek’s chief of staff, submitted a sworn statement to the court. Flick worked at SSA for nearly 30 years and retired earlier this year.
She explained that marking a living person as dead is extremely rare and usually only happens in a tiny fraction of cases, less than 0.3% of the 2.9 million deaths recorded each year.
Flick slammed the administration’s move to repurpose the death master file to target immigrants. She called it “unheard of and improper.”
She added that being falsely declared dead has devastating consequences. People lose access to banking, medical coverage, life insurance, and even face the risk of arrest for identity theft.
It also means they can’t get jobs, file taxes, or access important benefits like SNAP (food stamps), health programs under the Affordable Care Act, or renewals for Medicaid.
“Someone who is mistakenly added to the death master file could be completely shut out of everyday life,” Flick said. “It affects every system that depends on identity verification.”
Lawmakers are speaking out too. Democratic Reps. Richard Neal (Massachusetts) and John Larson (Connecticut) condemned the move in a joint statement. They said these actions rob people of due process.
“If they cancel one person’s Social Security number, what’s to stop them from canceling more?” the statement said. “This is an abuse of Social Security, plain and simple.”
The statement also accused the Trump administration and Elon Musk, who now leads DOGE, of being major threats to people’s hard-earned benefits.
“This is a wake-up call. If you care about Social Security, speak up,” the lawmakers said. “Because Trump and Musk are weaponizing it in ways we’ve never seen before.”