Questions: Society & Politics

What about people who come here to become immediately dependent on welfare that Americans have to pay for. Should they be allowed to come here?

The Trump administration is using personal data normally protected from dissemination to find undocumented immigrants where they work, study and live, often with the goal of removing them from their housing and the workforce.

At HUD officials are working on a rule that would ban mixed-status households — in which some family members have legal status and others don’t — from public housing, according to multiple staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution. Affiliates from the U. S. DOGE Service are also looking to kick out existing mixed-status households, vowing to ensure that undocumented immigrants do not benefit from public programs, even if they live with citizens or other eligible family members.

The push extends across agencies: Last week, Social Security numbers of more than 6,000 mostly Latino immigrants into a database it uses to track dead people, effectively slashing their ability to receive benefits or work legally in the United States. Federal tax and immigration enforcement officials recently reached a deal to share confidential tax data for people suspected of being in the United States illegall.

The result is an unprecedented effort to use government data to support the administration’s immigration policies. That includes information people have reported about themselves for years while paying taxes or applying for housing — believing that information would not be used against them for immigration purposes. Legal experts say the data sharing is a breach of privacy rules that help ensure trust in government programs and services.

“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, scrub these individuals from voter rolls, as well as identify what public benefits these aliens are using at taxpayer expense,” the department’s assistant secretary for public affairs said.