Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency task force is now jumping into the fight to help with President Donald Trump’s mass deportation project, Wired reported on Friday.
“DOGE is knitting together immigration databases from across DHS and uploading data from outside agencies including the Social Security Administration, as well as voting records, sources say. This, experts tell WIRED, could create a system that could later be searched to identify and surveil immigrants,” reported Makena Kelly and Vittoria Elliott. “The scale at which DOGE is seeking to interconnect data, including sensitive biometric data, has never been done before, raising alarms with experts who fear it may lead to disastrous privacy violations for citizens, certified foreign workers, and undocumented immigrants.”
Part of the object of this project will be to hunt for any evidence that immigrants are illegally voting — a practice which elections experts and data show is very rare, but has been a constant paranoid obsession of the Trump world.
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American Civil Liberties senior policy counsel Cody Venzke laid out the stakes in dire terms.
“As part of their fixation on this conspiracy theory that undocumented people are voting, they’re also pulling in tens of thousands, millions of US citizens who did nothing more than vote or file for Social Security benefits. It’s a massive dragnet that’s going to have all sorts of downstream consequences for not just undocumented people, but US citizens and people who are entitled to be here as well.”
“The ultimate concern is a panopticon of a single federal database with everything that the government knows about every single person in this country,” he added. “What we are seeing is likely the first step in creating that centralized dossier on everyone in this country.”
All of this comes as the Trump administration comes under fire for its mass deportation scheme that is sweeping up people it shouldn’t, the most notable case being Maryland family man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported to the infamous Salvadoran CECOT megaprison despite a court order barring him from being shipped to that country. The Trump administration is increasingly boldly refusing to comply with judicial demands to facilitate his return to the United States.