Experts Warn Government Has 'Run Roughshod Over the Law' as Social Security Confirms Expanded Data Sharing

The Social Security Administration has formally acknowledged that it is sharing citizenship and immigration information with the Department of Homeland Security, confirming activity that began months earlier without public notice.

The disclosure came through an updated system of record notice, a type of filing that by law must be issued before federal agencies exchange sensitive data, and was first reported by Wired. Experts told the site that issuing the notice only after the data was already shared represents a violation of the Privacy Act.

Adam Schwartz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told Wired:

"There are laws that require the government to inform the public about their use of various kinds of databases and other surveillance technologies. If the government starts using the database and does not put out the appropriate disclosure and then later does put out that appropriate disclosure, they still have violated the law"

Schwartz and other specialists described the scope of data sharing revealed in the notice as "unprecedented," noting that it reflects a broader effort by the Trump administration to consolidate information from agencies whose databases were never intended to be combined.

Former Social Security acting commissioner Leland Dudek told WIRED that while data exchanges with Homeland Security had existed, the new notice appears to go significantly further. He said it introduces a "special indicator code" that could allow the government to flag Social Security numbers and effectively disable their use without formally recording the individuals as deceased.

"You can literally cut off anyone's financial life you want," Dudek said, adding that he was not aware of safeguards to prevent misuse.

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The disclosure comes as the administration expands its data-driven approach to immigration enforcement across several agencies. Earlier this month, the federal government ordered states to reverify the immigration status of tens of thousands of Medicaid recipients.

Five states confirmed they were instructed to investigate more than 170,000 names, a move state officials described as duplicative, error-prone, and potentially harmful to eligible residents who could lose coverage for failing to respond to paperwork demands. Critics said the directive was "unprecedented" in the program's history and part of a broader push to link health programs to deportation efforts.

Other documents released in a separate lawsuit show that Immigration and Customs Enforcement sought extensive taxpayer information from the Internal Revenue Service, including home addresses, names of relatives, and bank data, to locate undocumented immigrants. By August, over a million records had been provided, with tens of thousands matched.

Advocates and legal experts say these efforts reveal an accelerating attempt to build a national citizenship database using information originally collected for unrelated purposes. Nikhel Sus of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington told Wired that the public "had no opportunity to weigh in" before the administration repurposed Social Security data, adding that these retroactive notices "only confirm after the fact that the government has run roughshod over the law."

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