The Trump Administration Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, now has access to one of the Justice Department’s most sensitive immigration databases, The Washington Post reports.
The database, called the Courts and Appeals System, is run by the Executive Office for Immigration Review and contains decades of detailed records on immigrants—both legal and undocumented. This includes home addresses, court transcripts, personal testimony from asylum seekers, and interview notes dating back to the 1990s.
This information goldmine was handed over to DOGE on Friday, according to The Post.
DOGE isn’t new to this kind of data. It’s already tapped into immigrant records from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the IRS, and even the Labor Department, which includes data on vulnerable farm workers.
The data grab is so aggressive it reportedly pushed the acting head of the IRS to resign earlier this month. His agency had just agreed to hand over undocumented immigrants’ taxpayer information to the Department of Homeland Security.
And it gets darker.
DOGE allegedly got the Social Security Administration to list thousands of living immigrants as dead, adding them to a federal “death file” used to cut off access to benefits. The goal? Pressure them to leave the country. Officials knew these people weren’t dead.
“They are trying to amass a huge amount of data,” a senior Homeland Security official told WIRED. “It has nothing to do with finding fraud or wasteful spending… They are already cross-referencing immigration with SSA and IRS as well as voter data.”
The ultimate aim appears to be the creation of a massive surveillance system to track undocumented immigrants across the U.S., pulling in data from nearly every major federal agency.
A federal judge stepped in Monday, blocking DOGE from digging further into parts of the Social Security system, but much of the damage may already be done.
The Justice Department refused to comment on The Post’s reporting.
