Credit: Getty Images.

More than 6,000 people living legally in the United States woke up one recent morning to discover they were dead.

They were still conscious and breathing, to be sure, but their deaths at the hands of the Trump administration were hardly metaphorical. In a very real bureaucratic sense, they were officially deemed no longer alive.

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It was one of a broad range of assaults by the Trump administration on people’s rights — whether it’s freedom of speech, protection against unreasonable searches or the right to not be deprived of one’s property or freedom without due process. And in its zeal to carry out President Donald J. Trump’s vow to execute the largest deportation of undocumented immigrants in American history, this stripping of rights hasn’t been limited to people who are in this country illegally, but is sweeping up legal residents and, in at least one instance in Florida last week, an American-born citizen.

The administrative “killings” were done by the Social Security Administration in cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security, which provided SSA with some 6,300 names of people they claim are on the terrorist watch list or who have FBI criminal records. The people were moved to the “Death Master File,” a comprehensive database of dead people.

Two things are particularly important to remember here: These were not illegal immigrants, but people who were here legally, which is the only way to qualify for a Social Security number.........

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