The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a Trump administration agency, has reportedly received clearance from the Justice Department to tap into a highly sensitive database that holds extensive records on immigrants’ dealings with the U.S. government.
The database—known as the Executive Office for Immigration Review’s Courts and Appeals System—stores records dating back to the 1990s. It includes details on millions of legal and undocumented immigrants: home addresses, case files, courtroom testimonies, and private interviews from asylum seekers.
According to The Washington Post, DOGE was granted access on Friday.
The Justice Department has not commented on the report.
DOGE has already pulled data from multiple federal agencies, including Housing and Urban Development, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Labor Department, targeting immigrants and farm workers.
A Growing Surveillance Web
The IRS’s decision to share taxpayer information of undocumented immigrants with the Department of Homeland Security reportedly triggered the resignation of its acting chief earlier this month.
DOGE is said to be integrating this multi-agency data into the Department of Homeland Security’s larger surveillance system.
A controversial part of this initiative involved pushing the Social Security Administration to place thousands of living immigrants in its “death file”—cutting off their legal and financial access as a pressure tactic to force self-deportation.
“They are trying to amass a huge amount of data,” a senior Homeland Security official told WIRED.
“It has nothing to do with finding fraud or wasteful spending … They are already cross-referencing immigration with SSA and IRS as well as voter data.”
On Monday, a federal judge issued a partial block, preventing Social Security staff from sharing large portions of their data with DOGE.
