#immigraton

Meryl Kornfield at WaPo:

The Trump administration had plans to classify 2.7 million living people — including some U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents — as dead as part of its immigration enforcement efforts, according to a former senior Social Security executive. The previously unreported plan, which the Social Security Administration said was not carried out, would have used one of the government’s most consequential identity databases to effectively erase people from the financial system, potentially cutting them off from wages, banking, government benefits and other services.

Jeremiah Schofield, who worked at Social Security for 25 years and helped lead the agency’s IT modernization efforts before leaving in October, said he refused to help implement the plan after agency lawyers warned that falsely marking living people as dead could violate federal law. Schofield said he realized the plan’s possible intent — to intimidate and worsen the finances of immigrants — as well as its potential unlawfulness after taking a sample of people from the 2.7 million and discovering they were all alive. Some were U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, teenagers and senior citizens, including one widow who was a legal permanent resident receiving survivor benefits.

Schofield has provided details on the plan in a 49-page whistleblower disclosure to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who is on the Senate Finance Committee, and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the ranking member on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The disclosure was reviewed by The Washington Post, and it offers the most detailed account yet of howofficials from Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service sought to use Social Security data in service of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. In an interview with The Post, Schofield said he is speaking publicly for the first time because he believes Americans need to understand how government data can be misused and, in some cases, already has been. Social Security carried out a smaller version of such an effort last year, The Post previously reported, moving 6,100 immigrants into its “Death Master File” — a database used by banks, employers and government agencies to determine whether someone is alive. Some of those people later showed up at Social Security field offices to prove they were alive and were restored in agency records.

[...]

Being moved into the Death Master File can be devastating to someone who is still alive because it can cut off their financial access. Last year, career staff warned that falsely giving people death dates could be catastrophic, though the administration overrode those objections. In the past year, two other whistleblowers have also shared concerns about Americans’ personal information being accessed and shared by DOGE. One whistleblower, former Social Security chief data officer Charles Borges, alleged DOGE members shared data through third-party services and placed Americans’ personal information on a cloud. A second whistleblower anonymously claimed in disclosures to the inspector general that a DOGE member allegedly took a thumb drive of Americans’ data to a private company, which is being investigated by the agency’s watchdog.

When Schofield left Social Security in October, he did not expect to blow the whistle. He said he followed legal requirements to destroy documents in his possession. He had told family and other co-workers about the call when it happened but had otherwise kept quiet as he watched other civil service workers facing retaliation in the Trump administration. But months later, at a February happy hour, he told another former federal worker he was haunted by what he had seen and how Social Security data had been compromised, and she encouraged him to speak out.

[...]

‘Lots of red flags’

When DOGE officials first arrived at Social Security headquarters in February 2025, Schofield welcomed their help and hoped they would help modernize the agency’s outdated systems, he said in an interview with The Post. Schofield joined the agency in 2000 as a customer service representative and rose through the ranks to become head of IT modernization and the key person transmitting headquarters policies to field offices. He had witnessed many ways the social service program — serving 75 million beneficiaries, including retirees, people with disabilities, widows and orphans — could be run more efficiently. So he came to his first meeting with DOGE officials with several ideas on how to help them.

But when he met with the DOGE members — Antonio Gracias, Jon Koval and Payton Rehling — the three identified themselves as volunteers, he said. He noticed they weren’t using the standard-issue laptops provided to Social Security employees. They had whiteboards in their conference room listing the agency’s key databases. They talked as if they had already seen data few others in government could access, he said. He said he worried DOGE was improperly accessing sensitive data. “Lots of red flags went off,” he said. Gracias was a longtime confidant of Musk’s and appeared alongside Musk at an event last year where the two made inaccurate claims about Social Security, including that that millions of undocumented immigrants were receiving federal benefits and voting in elections.

NB What people are calling the "radical, extreme-left agenda":

1. Medicare for All

2. A Living Wage & Labor Rights

3. K-16 schooling, aka Public Colleges

4. 100% Renewable Energy

5. Fixing the pipes in Flint

6. Not Hurting Immigrants

7. Holding Wall Street Accountable

Alex Samuels at Daily Kos:

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is seizing on the fatal shooting of a National Guard member in Washington—using the tragedy to push for a sweeping new travel ban that goes well beyond anything the administration has floated publicly. She rolled out the idea Monday night on X, casting it as the product of a conversation she’d just had with President Donald Trump. “I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” she wrote. “Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS. WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”

The post gestures back to Trump’s first-term travel ban—a bruising legal saga that began with a chaotic rollout targeting seven Muslim-majority countries and ended, after several rewrites, with a Supreme Court seal of approval in 2018. The bans were for Muslim-majority countries Iran, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia—and added a ban on travelers from North Korea and government officials from Venezuela. What Noem didn’t offer this time was any roadmap. She didn’t name the countries she wants blocked or explain the criteria for choosing them. A DHS spokesperson did not immediately respond to Daily Kos’ request for comment. It’s also unclear what, exactly, Trump has signed off on. He reposted Noem’s message on Truth Social during a sprawling late-night posting binge—more than 150 posts in a few hours—without adding an explanation of his own. Noem’s language, casting immigrants as “foreign invaders,” lands at a moment when the White House is tightening legal pathways in the wake of last week’s killing. Authorities say the gunman, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is an Afghan national who arrived in 2021 as part of the Biden-era resettlement effort and was granted asylum earlier this year under the Trump administration. Afghanistan is already among the 12 countries barred under the travel ban Trump issued in June.

Trump, for his part, has only sharpened his rhetoric since the killing. On Thanksgiving, he promised to “permanently pause migration from all third-world countries” and floated something he called “reverse migration”—a phrase that appeared to endorse stripping citizenship from foreign nationals and deporting those he deems “non-compatible with Western Civilization.”

Fascist dog-killer DHS Head Kristi Noem makes a comically insane push for a full-on travel ban of several more nations added on to the current ones in the wake of the DC National Guard shooting.

See Also:

HuffPost: Kristi Noem Roasted Over Bonkers Trump Travel Ban Recommendation

Jessica Schulberg and Paul Blumenthal at HuffPost:

During his first presidential campaign nearly 10 years ago, Donald Trump promised to “load” up the infamous prison at Guantánamo Bay with “some bad dudes.” Weeks after Trump’s second inauguration, the administration put 10 migrants on a flight to Guantánamo, claiming without evidence that they were members of a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua. Over the next several weeks, the administration sent hundreds of migrants to the offshore naval base and Trump ordered government officials to prepare to imprison as many as 30,000 migrants at Guantánamo. The influx of detainees, many of whom had never been charged with a crime, invoked images of the post-Sept. 11, 2001, so-called “war on terror”: secret prisons where torture was rampant, years of litigation over what rights applied at Guantánamo, defense contractors inking multimillion-dollar construction deals, and people who would never walk free nor be charged with doing anything wrong. “If you go back to the early days of the War on Terror, Guantánamo was supposed to be the legal equivalent of outer space, where no law applied. It’s that threat that you saw the Trump administration invoking in order to terrorize immigrants,” said J. Wells Dixon, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, a civil liberties nonprofit that played a major role in challenging war on terror detentions at Guantánamo and is now challenging the Trump administration’s migrant detentions. But in mid-March, all of the immigration detainees were removed from Guantánamo, amid mounting legal challenges, concerns over the tent structures on the base not meeting ICE detention standards, infighting between the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security, and a staggering $40 million price tag in just one month. (As of April 4, there were 45 migrants detained at the base. The Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Southern Command did not respond to requests for updated numbers.) On March 15, shortly after ICE sent all migrants in Guantánamo back to U.S. facilities, Trump signed an executive order, claiming that Tren de Aragua had “invaded” the U.S., and that any Venezuelan migrant age 14 or older with alleged ties to the gang could be removed under the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century wartime authority only previously invoked during the War of 1812 and both World Wars. That same day, the administration rushed three flights holding 238 Venezuelans and 23 Salvadorans it claimed were gang members, without evidence in most cases, off to El Salvador. A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to halt the removals and turn the flights around, but the administration did not comply. Once in El Salvador, the migrants were sent to an infamous maximum security prison called the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT). The U.S. is reportedly paying El Salvador about $6 million to imprison the detainees.

According to human rights observers, people imprisoned in El Salvador are often subjected to torture, severe overcrowding, inadequate food and medical care and are denied access to legal counsel. No one imprisoned at CECOT has ever left; Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on Wednesday that the migrants sent there “should stay there for the rest of their lives.” Those who helped fight for due process protections at Guantánamo Bay under the administration of President George W. Bush view the Trump administration’s migrant detention policy as an escalation of war on terror legal tactics. It’s “an effort to outsource detention and torture to avoid the constraints of U.S. law,” said Dixon. “It’s the natural consequence and evolution of what we’ve seen throughout the last 20 years, certainly with the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program and the use of black sites overseas.”

“The reason they’ve moved out of Guantánamo is, and this is ironic, but there’s too much rule of law there,” said Karen Greenberg, the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law and author of multiple books on Guantánamo and the cases that emerged from the war on terror. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. In 2008, the Supreme Court held in Boumediene v. Bush that although Guantánamo Bay is outside of U.S. sovereignty, people detained there have the right to challenge the legality of their detention. “The Nation’s basic charter cannot be contracted away like this. The Constitution grants Congress and the President the power to acquire, dispose of, and govern territory, not the power to decide when and where its terms apply. To hold that the political branches may switch the Constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this Court, say ‘what the law is,’” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority, citing the landmark 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison where the court declared the ability to rule on the constitutionality of laws.

But that’s exactly what the Trump administration is attempting to do by rendering migrants to CECOT. Take the case of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Salvadoran migrant who was sent to CECOT, despite having legal protections from being deported there. The Trump administration eventually admitted he was deported based on an “administrative error.” When a federal judge ordered the government to facilitate Ábrego García’s return to the U.S., the Trump administration argued that because he was in El Salvador, they couldn’t bring him back and that courts had no authority to intervene. That line of reasoning harkened back to the Bush administration’s efforts to claim that matters of national security and foreign policy were outside of the purview of judicial review.

Labour is ‘winning Tory votes’ says Shadow Foreign Secretary

Labour is ‘winning Tory votes’ says Shadow Foreign Secretary Source link

Gov’s approach to the NI protocol is ‘probably a road to no where,’ says EU ambassador to the UK

Gov’s approach to the NI protocol is ‘probably a road to no where,’ says EU ambassador to the UK Source link

‘I don’t agree with the rail strikes,’ says Lib Dem deputy leader

‘I don’t agree with the rail strikes,’ says Lib Dem deputy leader Source link