People protest against ICE’s arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil outside the Newark courthouse on March 27, 2025, in Newark, N.J.
by Kena Betancur/VIEWpress/Corbis via Getty

Donald Trump’s administration moved this week to declare thousands of immigrants dead.

The 6,000-plus very-much-alive people, predominantly undocumented immigrants from Latin America, continue to eat, sleep, breathe, and work on U.S. soil. Their names have nonetheless been added to the Social Security Administration’s “death master file,” the database used to list dead people who should no longer receive benefits.

The New York Times, the first to report on the perverse repurposing of the death master file, noted with unusual pointedness that the administration was including “the names of living people who the government believes should be treated as if they are dead.”

The dead have no claim to rights.

Listing immigrants among the dead is a nasty workaround to swiftly remove access to means of survival in this country – permanently cutting off access to benefits, bank accounts, and the ability to legally work. It’s just the latest move in a relentless effort to make life so unliveable for immigrants, such that they will be forced to choose to leave, if not swept up by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and deported first.

This is more than cruel expediency. Death is the point.

The Trump administration is openly stating its willingness to condemn millions of people to civic and social death on multiple fronts, from immigrants marked as dead by the Social Security Administration, to denying trans people access to passports, correct documentation, or any existence according to government records at all.

This is not mere metaphorical killing: Expulsion from official public life can be truly deadly.

Trump’s escalation of necropolitical rule – historian Achille Mbembe’s notion of governance organized around exposing certain groups to premature death and elimination – is producing a fascist reality that threatens to revoke the legal rights of whole swathes of the population.

The dead, after all, have no claim to rights.

Mahmoud Khalil’s Rights

These necropolitical affronts aren’t just visible on Social Security rolls. They are an unspoken part of so many of........

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