Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Justice Department have given DOGE access to a system that contains sensitive data on millions of legal and undocumented immigrants, including their addresses and detailed case histories, according to The Washington Post.
The Executive Office for Immigration Review’s Courts and Appeals System, or ECAS, keeps records of everyone who’s been in the U.S. immigration system. Now six DOGE employees have permission to stick their hands in it.
DOGE has meddled in multiple different federal databases in an effort to carry out Trump’s immigration crackdown. ICE is using a Medicare database to locate undocumented immigrants. The Social Security Administration is trying to force immigrants to self-deport by falsely labeling 6,000 as dead. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is trying to prevent immigrants in mixed-status households from receiving government benefits, and the IRS is sharing migrant tax information with the Department of Homeland Security.
“It really hearkens to what we’re seeing with Social Security, with the IRS, with data that was shared with an expectation of privacy, “ National Immigration Law Center senior staff attorney Lynn Damiano Pearson told the Post. She went on to note that DOGE’s access to ECAS would have “very concerning impacts for immigrants, even ones who have specifically tried to comply with government policies and do everything right, so to speak.”