Last week, The Social Security Administration (SSA) has quietly updated a public notice to reveal that the agency will share “immigration and immigration information” with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This data sharing was already happening: Wired reported in April that the Trump administration had begun looking closely at sensitive data from across the government for immigration purposes.
This public notice issued by the SSA makes that official, months after the fact. The notice is known as a system of record notice (sorn), a document that explains what data the agency will share, with whom, and for what purpose. This notice is required under the Privacy Act 1974. Usually, Sorns are issued before any data is shared between the organizations, giving the public and government officials enough time to comment. But Wired discovered that the so-called Department of Government Operations (Doge) was pulling data from DHS, IRS, and State Security data, from the US Civil Service and Intelligence’s (USCIS) database.
“There are laws that require the government to notify the public about their use of various types of information and other surveillance technologies,” said the director of privacy medicine at Electronic Privacy Talk, a nonprofit focused on digital speech and free speech. “If the government starts using the database and doesn’t issue proper disclosure then later it does Put that proper disclosure, they still broke the law. “
The Trump administration has gone to great lengths to remake the government in its own image. A key part of this has been the effort to obtain a large oath of data from all Federal agencies, many of which were not intended to be denied. This often happens regardless of the rules, regulations, or procedures that usually govern access to and sharing of sensitive information. The sorn from the SSA is the latest confirmation of how much information is being shared in ways that experts have told the wires are “unprecedented.”
Much of this data sharing begins with Mistinfformation about nearby data. In the first days of the Trump Administration, Elon Musk was caught in the ambiguity of the SSA data to spread the claim that people aged 150 are receiving benefits. They were not, but the DoGE was united in the view that the SSA systems were ineffective and fraudulent to fill in technical and technical organizations. In April, reporting from the New York Times found that in an effort to get immigrants to drink, the administration was adding to the SSA’s database of dead people, effectively ensuring that their social security numbers could not be used to get jobs or access government services. As part of an effort to combine classified data across the government to verify citizenship and surveilst, the DHS has recently published successful changes to the voter verification process, which experts also warned could exceed the requirements of the Privacy Act.
Leland Dudek, who served as Commissioner of Social Security Administration Operations between February and May 2025, led the organization when members of the doju appeared. Dudek says he initially supported the dogle and acted as a bridge between SSA staff and members of Doge’s team before becoming disillusioned.
