EXCLUSIVE: Immigrants Prove They Are Alive, Forcing Social Security To Undo Death Label

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By Hannah Natanson, Lisa Rein and Meryl Kornfield

Immigrants falsely labeled dead by the Social Security Administration are showing up at field offices with documents proving they are alive, leading staff to reinstate nearly three dozen people over the past week, according to records obtained by The Washington Post.

The immigrants who have requested a reversal and been reinstated in Social Security databases include a Haitian asylum seeker and a child, the records show. Some immigrants have shown up with driver’s licenses and work permits to prove their legitimacy, the records show. Others have arrived bearing letters of notification that they received from their states declaring them dead.

The reversals come after the Department of Homeland Security and Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service pushed to incorrectly label roughly 6,100 mostly Latino immigrants as dead in a bid to pressure them to leave the country. The administration overrode the objections of senior Social Security staff to label the immigrants as dead — a move that current and former top officials at the agency warned was illegal because it violates privacy laws and involves the purposeful falsification of government records.

Social Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. Asked about the resurrections, the White House said the 6,000 immigrants were never really listed as dead.

“This reporting is false. These illegal aliens were never classified as dead,” White House spokeswoman Liz Huston said in a statement. “The ‘Death Master File’ was renamed the ‘Ineligible Master File’ prior to their names being transferred. Once U.S. Customers and Border Protection terminated their parole, these individuals were no longer eligible for benefits, and Social Security Administration quickly took action to protect the benefits of hardworking American citizens.”

That statement contradicts statements last week from a White House official and a senior Social Security official, both of whom explicitly confirmed that the immigrants had been labeled dead in hopes of spurring their departures from the United States. As of Friday, the database is still named the “Death Master File” in Social Security’s internal systems, per records obtained by The Post, and referred to by the same name on the agency’s public website.

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