Trump Signs Order Barring Illegal Immigrants From Receiving Social Security

‘These taxpayer-funded benefits should be only for eligible taxpayers,’ said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

A woman walks past a Social Security Administration office in Flushing, New York City, on Feb. 10, 2021. Chung I Ho/The Epoch Times

President Donald Trump signed a memorandum on April 15 directing several federal agencies to take measures to prevent Social Security payments from going to ineligible people such as illegal immigrants and fraudsters.

The memorandum was directed at the Social Security Administration inspector general, the Social Security commissioner, the attorney general, and the secretaries of labor, health and human services, and homeland security.

Meanwhile, the commissioner is directed to cooperate with the attorney general to expand the SSA’s full-time fraud prosecutor program specifically targeting identity theft and beneficiary-side fraud to at least 50 U.S. Attorney Offices by Oct. 1.

The memo also “establishes a Medicare and Medicaid fraud prosecution program in 15 U.S. Attorney offices,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a press briefing.

Department heads are ordered to prioritize the placement of prosecutors in both programs to the offices whose jurisdiction has been determined by Homeland Security to cover the top 10 largest known populations of illegal immigrants.

The memo also directs the inspector general of the Social Security Administration (SSA) to investigate earnings reports for individuals over the age of 100. Earlier this year the Department of Government Efficiency reported that hundreds of eligible Social Security recipients were found to be well over a century old

The inspector general is also required to investigate instances of mismatched Social Security records to combat identity theft.

The SSA will be asked to consider resuming the implementation of civil monetary penalties on individuals found to have engaged in Social Security fraud.

“These taxpayer-funded benefits should be only for eligible taxpayers, and President Biden should think about what he did in his last term, which is allow tens of millions of illegal people into our country, many of whom were fraudulently receiving these benefits,” Leavitt said.

This latest executive action was made shortly after the White House announced that more than 6,300 illegal immigrants had been stripped of Social Security and other federal benefits. Those individuals had been paroled into the United States by the Biden administration during or after 2023 and were flagged as a national security risk, holding a criminal record, or listed in the FBI’s terrorist screening database. Their parole, which shielded them from deportation, ended on April 8.

Those individuals’ Social Security numbers were reclassified by the SSA into an Ineligible Master File to further ensure they can never access federal aid again.

The SSA also announced on April 15, before Trump’s signing of the memorandum, that it launched new identification technology. Specifically, it targets suspicious activity in telephone claims and bank changes by analyzing anomalies and patterns within a person’s account and requiring in-person identity proofing at a Social Security office if irregularities are detected.

The changing of bank information over the phone accounted for approximately 40 percent of direct deposit fraud, according to the SSA, with the Inspector General’s Office estimating that $33.5 million in benefits for nearly 21,000 beneficiaries was misdirected between January 2013 and May 2018.

The SSA has implemented the Department of the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s Account Verification Service (AVS) to secure instant verification, but these two entities are not the only ones collaborating.

Work to oust illegal immigration by tracking the flow of money has also begun between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the IRS, using the sharing of taxpayer data to target possibly dangerous illegal immigrants.

“Information sharing across agencies is essential to identify who is in our country, including violent criminals, determine what public safety and terror threats may exist so we can neutralize them, scrub these individuals from voter rolls, as well as identify what public benefits these aliens are using at the American taxpayer expense,” a DHS spokesperson told The Epoch Times.

Anne Johnson, Chase Smith, and Jack Phillips contributed to this report.