Immigration Brutality At Social Security

      From Fox 4:

59-year-old Ramona Rakestraw said she has relied on Supplemental Security Income, or SSI, as her sole source of income while battling kidney disease and cancer. She tells FOX 4 that her payments stopped in October after she was told her immigration status was under review.

Rakestraw said she was born in 1966 at Parkland Hospital in Dallas [where JFK was taken after being shot] and has never lived outside Dallas County nor has she traveled outside the United States.

Kidney disease first sent Rakestraw to dialysis at age 28. 

She later received a transplant, but about 30 years later she returned to dialysis and received a cancer diagnosis in 2024.  …

Rakestraw said she took her identification and birth certificate to her local Social Security office in an effort to resolve the issue.

"That’s my income, my whole income," she said. …

Rakestraw said she has filed an appeal and completed the required paperwork. …

     And now the problem has been solved. It only took the involvement of a TV station. 

Over 1 Billion SSNs Exposed

      From PC Mag:

In a disturbing find, a cybersecurity vendor discovered an exposed online database that may have been storing as many as 1 billion Social Security numbers (SSNs). 

A database indexed using Elasticsearch was left open on the internet, according to security provider UpGuard. The stockpile contained 3 billion records, including email addresses and passwords, along with another dataset of 2.7 billion records, including SSNs.

Specifically, the SSNs consisted of two datasets spanning 353.3GB and 76.7GB, for a total of 430GB, UpGuard told PCMag. The company suspects a hacker or “amateurish threat intelligence vendor” is behind the database.  …

Other Than This, DOGE Was Great

      From an Interim Staff Analysis by the Democratic Staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform:

Following Elon Musk’s support for Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, President Trump handed the U.S. government over to the world’s richest man through the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. DOGE was nothing short of a catastrophe. It failed to achieve its stated goals and wreaked havoc across the federal government, weakening or terminating programs and services that the American people rely on and endangering privacy and public safety while President Trump and his billionaire friends line their own pockets. This interim staff analysis presents a preliminary account of DOGE’s costly and destructive actions during the first 13 months of President Trump’s second Administration, including: 

• Decimation and Demoralization of the Federal Workforce. DOGE coordinated with other executive branch agencies to purge the expert federal workforce and chill the nonpartisan civil servants that are left to serve the public. 

• Unlawful Attacks on Statutory Programs. The Trump Administration and DOGE have unlawfully attempted to abolish statutory programs and agencies. 

• Delay, Degradation, and Elimination of Programs and Services for Americans. From delays in getting new medications to patients, to diminished access to Social Security services and food safety inspections, to greater wildfire risks, to a global instability, the harms DOGE has imposed on the everyday lives of Americans are vast, varied, and still unfolding.

• Reckless Handling of Americans’ Data. DOGE illegally deployed systems and forcefully accessed data across federal agencies in clear violation of federal privacy and cybersecurity laws, putting Americans’ data and civil liberties at risk. 

• Dismantling of Safeguards Against Waste, Fraud, Abuse, and Corruption. The Trump Administration has weakened or eliminated key offices, fired employees, and invalidated or removed rules and regulations dedicated to protecting the public interest; and 

• Lying to the American Public. DOGE and its defenders have been caught providing false claims in court and to the American people. Additionally, DOGE claims that it terminated more than 13,440 contracts, 264 leases, and 15,887 grants across the federal government. However, DOGE’s estimated “savings” have been frequently found to be wildly inaccurate and inconsistent. The high costs of DOGE unequivocally erase any verified savings it can claim, and the full extent of its lies are still coming into focus. DOGE personnel also violated security protocols when accessing highly sensitive Social Security Administration data and potentially deceived agency leaders and federal courts to avoid disclosing those violations.

The Trump Administration has funneled an estimated $81 million to fund DOGE employees, resources, and activities with virtually no transparency or mechanisms of accountability. This staff analysis resulted in the following preliminary findings regarding the American people’s return on this egregiously mishandled investment:  

• Through DOGE alone, President Trump has cost the American people billions of dollars in damage and an intangible amount of waste and suffering. 

• President Trump used DOGE as a smokescreen to make billionaires richer at the expense of hardworking Americans. 

• America needs serious oversight and government reform that is by, of, and for the American people—not reckless and corrupt billionaires.

A New Cyberattack

      From Hackread:

A new wave of cyberattacks is stalking organisations across the UK, US, Canada, and Northern Ireland. According to the latest research from Forcepoint X-labs, attackers are impersonating the US Social Security Administration (SSA) to bypass security and take total control of private computers. ...  

It starts with an email that looks official but is riddled with red flags, like the fake domain SSA.COM and the misspelling of Statement as “eStatemet.” If a user falls for the bait and opens the attached .cmd script, the computer quietly begins to sabotage its own defences. The X-labs team’s report noted that the script’s first job is to check for administrator powers using a technique called PowerShell auto-elevation. Once it has control, it kills Windows SmartScreen (the system that usually blocks suspicious apps from running) by modifying the computer’s registry. It also strips away the Mark-of-the-Web, a hidden digital tag Windows uses to identify files from the internet. ...  

Once the guards are down, the script performs a silent installation of ConnectWise ScreenConnect. In a normal office, this is a legitimate tool for IT support. However, here, hackers are weaponising it as a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) to maintain a permanent “backdoor” into the network. Researchers noted that the software is hardcoded via a System.config file to call back to a specific server: ...

An Analysis Of The New Plan To Use SSA To Trap Inmigrants

       We face the prospect of noncitizens showing up for appointments at Social Security being arrested by ICE on their way into or out of the office because the agency has tipped off ICE. AltSSA, an anonymous Blue Sky account, has analyzed some of the legal aspects of what’s going to happen.

1/21 OK we are gonna start with this story. This is gonna be long and a little nuanced so stick with me. There will be a lot in here that will address SSA employees directly so if you know an SSA employee, please share with them! And if you see any errors or gaps in my knowledge, please let me know!

https://www.wired.com/story/social-security-administration-appointment-details-ice/

2/21 First it’s important to point out that allowing this type of data sharing is not technically new. It has been rare, specific, and approved individually. Also reminder here that if an immigrant has an SSN, they were documented and legal at the time the SSN was issued. We verify it with DHS.

3/21 A lot of appts are by phone, but certain appts require we verify ID and/or legal status at the appt, so these are done in person. This includes applying for an SSN for the first time, or a replacement card if not a citizen, or applying for benefits if you are an immigrant who can (ie refugees).

4/21 Side note that requiring immigrants already on benefits (mostly refugees who are disabled or elderly) to reverify legal status in person when doing their periodic redetermination, even if we know the document they have has an expiration date in the future, is a new policy and not coincidental.

5/21 This is likely because the regime is doing things like terminating Temporary Protected Status for countries like Haiti, which is, by definition, creating undocumented immigrants who were documented and legal until they changed that. Because they are garbage meat sacks masquerading as humans. 🤬🤬

6/21 Anyway. Let’s talk about current policy around sharing data with law enforcement/DHS. Like many of our policies, you can view this online (see link). This policy was last updated 4/2025 so by this regime. It details that such requests are supposed to be in writing and meet specific criteria.

https://secure.ssa.gov/apps10/poms.nsf/lnx/0203313095

7/21 The specific criteria can be found here (secure.ssa.gov/apps10/poms....) and here (secure https://secure.ssa.gov/apps10/poms.nsf/lnx/0203312080) and they are very specific. Each request is supposed to be approved individually by the Office of Privacy and Disclosure within the Office of the General Counsel at SSA.

8/21 Now they do mention one other policy that allows for ad hoc requests by LEOs (https://secure.ssa.gov/apps10/poms.nsf/lnx/0203312090....) which was updated in December 2025, but even that requires approval by the OPD and does not state an SSA employee can just give info to an ICE agent. It says the opposite actually.

9/21 So why did I do a policy deep dive? So it is crystal clear to everyone that this communication is being given verbally to specific offices only because they know this goes against our own policies and is almost certainly illegal on some level. This is not something we are allowed to do. Period. …

“They Should Be Helping Us”

       From The Columbian:

For the past several weeks, Sandra Graber has been desperately trying to help her friend, a 79-year-old Vancouver [Washington] resident, recover Social Security payments that didn’t arrive in December and January.

Her friend can’t go online to resolve the issue because she doesn’t own a computer.

Many senior citizens across Clark County and the United States are grappling with recent changes to Social Security and the increasing role that digital technology plays in their day-to-day lives.

Graber — a Cornelius, Ore., resident — didn’t want her friend named because she has early-onset dementia. Graber serves as her agent under power of attorney. She recently took her to the Social Security Administration office in Vancouver, where they were told that they could either wait in line for several hours or make an appointment for two months out. 

“They should be helping us. We’re paying them to help us,” Graber said. “And saying, ‘We’re short staffed; we just can’t get to it,’ that’s inexcusable. I’m sure there’s other people out there that are having the same problem that we’re having, and I feel sorry for them.” …

Graber, however, remains frustrated that the system hasn’t provided a viable way for people such as her friend who can’t go online and can’t easily confirm their identity in person or via phone call due to medical issues to access their benefits.

“There are people out there with different problems,” Graber said. “It just doesn’t make a lot of sense.” …

Suicide Is “One Option”

      From Government Executive:

The Social Security Administration has instructed employees newly assigned to answering phones to tell callers expressing suicidal thoughts that suicide is “one option,” raising concerns from employees and experts in the field who called the approach unorthodox.  

SSA recently began shifting new swaths of its workforce to phone answering duty, including those who normally receive and process retirement and disability claims, manage the agency’s technology and work in the agency's finances unit. Those employees received brief, three-hour training before they began answering calls.  …

Employees at the training, which occurred on Jan. 26 for benefits authorizers and post-entitlement technical experts, were taken aback by the comment and asked their supervisors for clarity. One employee at the training said there was “disbelief that it was just said” among those in the room.  

Caitlin Thompson, a clinical psychologist who spent eight years at the Veterans Affairs Department as a clinical care coordinator on the Veterans Crisis Line and later as the department’s national director of suicide prevention, said SSA's approach did not follow commonly accepted best practices.  

“It’s not a normal thing to say,” Thompson said. “No. That’s not the thing you say to somebody who might be suicidal.”  …

ICE Will Be Given SSA Appointment Info

       From Wired:

Workers at the Social Security Administration (SSA) have been told to share information about in-person appointments with agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), WIRED has learned.

“If ICE comes in and asks if someone has an upcoming appointment, we will let them know the date and time,” an employee with direct knowledge of the directive says. They spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. …

Noncitizens are also required to appear in-person to review continued eligibility of benefits. …

     ICE arresting people outside Social Security offices with help from Social Security is highly disturbing.