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Trump's goons have come up with a heinous new way to harass immigrants



NPR broke the news over the weekend that the Department of Homeland Security
has teamed up with the so-called Department of Governmental Efficiency to build
a centralized citizenship database, complete with Social Security and
immigration data.

The Trump administration is pretending that this was done for the benefit of
state and local election officials, to give them a one-stop shop to verify the
citizenship status of voters.

About that …




 



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First, this effort sounds an awful lot like the same thing WIRED reported
roughly two months ago. That’s not meant as a slam on NPR’s reporting, but
rather on the Trump administration’s transparent efforts at repackaging what
was once clearly intended to be a tool to track immigrants, all in the service
of terrorizing them.

Back then, DOGE was uploading IRS, Social Security, and voting data to the
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services database. This was around the same
time that the Trump administration purposely marked 6,100 immigrants as dead,
despite knowing that they were very much alive. The goal? To prevent immigrants
from earning wages.

This time around, DOGE still has access to federal databases, ignoring the
Privacy Act of 1974, which limits how government employees can use private data
and prohibits sharing it between agencies unless the subject of the data is
notified and consents.

Even if we pretend that election security is the real goal behind letting DOGE
run wild, framing this as some sort of assistance to election officials is
absurd. It’s just part of President Donald Trump’s theory that he would have
won the popular vote in 2016 had non-citizens not voted illegally and that the
2020 election was stolen from him.

The conjoined database is just a high-tech way of doing what Trump tried to do
during his first term, when he convened his Election Fraud Commission to demand
that every state send complete voter data—to an insecure email address, of
course. After a little more than a year, the commission packed up, having
failed to find any widespread voter fraud, much less the millions of
non-citizens who Trump alleged voted illegally.




 



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No matter how many times Republicans insist that non-citizens are voting,
it’s actually extremely rare, and it certainly doesn’t happen enough to alter
an election outcome. The GOP’s repeated attempts to remove the thousands and
thousands of alleged non-citizens from voter rolls tend to result in a lot of
citizens getting removed instead.

A citizenship database also tracks what Trump was trying to do with his March
executive order that forced states to agree to Trump’s fraud theories or lose
federal funding. People would need written proof of citizenship to vote, and
mail-in ballots received after Election Day would not be counted. Those
provisions have been blocked by a federal judge, but hey, why not just build a
citizenship database anyway?

Election officials already have an effective method of checking voter
registration data through the Electronic Registration Information Center. But
after Trump’s efforts to prove that the 2020 election was stolen, several red
states withdrew from ERIC when right-wing conspiracy theorists decided that it
was “woke.”

If the citizenship database really was intended to ease the burden of state
election officials, having the feral rodents of DOGE build it was never going
to result in sound data. DOGE employees are the same people who, when asked to
review which Department of Veterans Affairs contract should be canceled,
decided to let AI handle it.

Now those geniuses have done a quick and dirty compilation of private
government data to track citizenship. Surely nothing will go wrong.



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