The memo taps the Labor and Health and Human Services departments, in addition to SSA, to “take all reasonable measures...to ensure ineligible aliens are not receiving funds from Social Security Act programs," though there is no evidence that undocumented immigrants are receiving such benefits. Douglas Sacha / Getty Images
Trump ‘anti-fraud’ memo could allow SSA to stop paying some Americans’ earned benefits
The document’s publication comes just days after reports that DOGE operatives overruled career workers to falsely label thousands of immigrants as dead.
Just days after reports surfaced that administration officials listed more than 6,000 living immigrants as dead in a key Social Security database, President Trump signed a memo Tuesday that could give the green light for the agency to effectively strip hundreds of thousands of Americans of their legally obtained benefits.
The document, entitled Preventing Illegal Aliens from Obtaining Social Security Act Benefits, tasks federal officials with issuing new guidance and regulations aimed at combating undocumented immigrants receiving Social Security benefits and to punish state or local governments that don’t follow suit. It also calls for the expanded hiring of “full-time fraud prosecutors” across the Justice Department.
There exists no evidence that undocumented immigrants are unlawfully receiving Social Security benefits; indeed, the agency’s inspector general has estimated that SSA’s fraud rate is less than 1%. Further, undocumented immigrants actually pour more than $25 billion into the Social Security trust fund via payroll taxes each year, despite being ineligible for benefits, thereby extending its solvency.
“President Trump has been spreading falsehoods about undocumented immigrants and Social Security for a long time, and this executive order is his latest attempt to misinform the public,” said Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research and policy nonprofit. “In fact, for decades, the Social Security Act has required noncitizens to be lawfully present in the U.S. to receive Social Security or Supplemental Security Income.”
Trump’s memo calls on relevant agencies and the newly expanded fraud prosecutors to focus on fighting instances of both identity theft and “beneficiary-side” fraud. Democrats and Social Security experts have argued that the Trump administration's scouring of Social Security for signs of fraud while further gutting an agency already at a 50-year staffing low are intended to reduce the public’s confidence in its retirement and disability programs, opening the door to privatization.
Language in the memo ordering the stop of payments to “deceased or otherwise ineligible payees” and preventing “ineligible aliens from receiving funds” bears a resemblance to a proposal, first reported by Government Executive last month, to stop issuing payments to representative payees without Social Security numbers on behalf of American beneficiaries.
If put in place, that could jeopardize the payments of thousands receiving retirement, disability and low-income benefits from the agency. According to an internal memo on the proposal, upwards of 170,000 beneficiaries could have their payments cut off, at least temporarily.
Within SSA, this plan has yet to move forward, though this new memo’s focus on “recipient side fraud” and “ineligible payees” suggests that it's still in the offing.
The only time the agency pays people who are in the U.S. without legal status is when they’re a representative payee, one SSA employee previously told Government Executive. Payees are at times tapped on behalf of eligible beneficiaries, including disabled children as well as elderly and disabled adults. Currently, they aren’t currently required to be eligible for benefits themselves or have a Social Security number.
“This [memo] could easily be used to prevent undocumented individuals from serving as payees for their disabled children,” said one SSA employee.
Indeed, a fact sheet issued by the White House cites statistics from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a right-wing nonprofit founded by white supremacist John Tanton, regarding the purported annual cost of “illegal aliens and their children.”
The scope of the memo could potentially scale beyond SSA benefits alone, too, given that it names the Social Security Act programs writ large, which include unemployment insurance, Medicare and Medicaid. The document taps the leaders of the Labor and Health and Human Services departments, in addition to SSA, to “take all reasonable measures, consistent with applicable law, to ensure ineligible aliens are not receiving funds from Social Security Act programs.”
Martin O’Malley, who served as Social Security commissioner for the final year of former President Biden’s term, said the plans to “financially murder”–as he described it–undocumented immigrants and to make it harder for Americans to receive their benefits by making their legal representatives ineligible to receive their checks have a common goal.
“If they go forward with this representative payee plan, they are talking about interrupting benefits that are legally owed to Americans and American-born children here in the U.S.,” he said. “Just because someone might not have proof of their legal status on an SSA record doesn’t mean they aren’t the representative payee for a U.S. citizen, whether it be their husband with a disability, a mother-in-law, an American-born child. This is all on brand for them, because they enjoy inflicting cruelty on people in the name of going after immigrants.”