Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Cambridge, UK—Elon Musk may have a knack for thinking outside the box, but reportedly his twisted scheme to force even totally legal and law-abiding immigrants to lose their ability to work or continue to work legally is akin to his not-so-brilliant idea of putting “self-driving” Teslas on streets when the such vehicles have shown a propensity to drive into motorcycles and pedestrians. The sick scheme in this latest DOGE brainstorm is to force those immigrants to either work off-the-books without a valid Social Security number, risking deportation and loss of their already earned right to work and to stay permanently in the US, or to “self-deport” by returning to their home country.

Under the new Trump administration, the only way to correct a false report if one has been falsely declared dead is to show up in a Social Security Office in person. The problem with that pointless requirement though, is that many offices around the country have been shuttered by the Trump administration, which is deliberately making people either do things online or to use the SSA’s grossly understaffed phone number help line. That means, especially for older people, rectifying a false report of one’s death can be a challenge. Yet proving one was falsely declared dead to SSA should be easy to do by going to a police office, a post office, a state license and registration office, a Senatorial or Representative constuent services office, or even a licensed notary public!

Musk’s criminal scheme, explaIned in detail in a story in the Washington Post, which was alerted to it by angry employees, was to bust into the Social Security Agency’s not-so-secure Death Master File, which is supposed to be used to stop benefit checks of SS beneficiaries who had died, and to add the names of 6100 living legal immigrants of all ages 16-80, most of them with Hispanic surnames, in effect “killing them” as far as Social Security is concerned.

Without a SSN, noemployer, especially these days, will hire someone, and even currently employed legal immigrants, who may have legally been having FICA payroll taxes deducted each month by their employers. Such workers will, if the fraud is not corrected, be unable to collect benefits without a valid SSN.

Even worse, it’s likely that any current employer of such a person would sooner of later discover or be alerted by the the Social Security Administration that the SSN for an employee put on the SSA’s Death Master File no longer has a valid Social Security account.

We can be sure that the the US Dept. of Justice, the appropriate agency to investigate this cruel crime and send its author Musk and his teenage work crew to jail for a long time, will inastead do nothing. Headed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, the shameless........

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