Musk lies about immigrants getting Social Security numbers — which Trump helped to speed up

Lying or stupid? With everyone involved — Musk, Trump, congressional Republicans — we can assume both.

Apr 01, 2025

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Two guys speaking very confidently about something they don’t understand.

Latest story: Musk Blames Dems for Trump Giving Immigrants Social Security Numbers. Stories coming as soon as this week: Something like, Elections Executive Order is Part of Trump’s Unconstitutional Power Grab, and something like, DOGE's Massive Data Gathering is a Violation of the Privacy Act (HEDs TBD). Plus, congressional Republicans plan to introduce the SAVE Act, which would make it more difficult for 21 million Americans to vote — including your wife and mother. Ask them about it because they probably know.

This is a lot of work! If you want to support the firehose of independent journalism I’m producing here at American Doom, please consider a paid subscription or dropping a few dollars into the Coffee Fund.

Now, on to the news…

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At his town hall in Wisconsin on Sunday night — where he broke election law by offering $1 million checks to Wisconsinites to vote in a state supreme court election — Elon Musk and his private equity ally, Antonio Gracias, continued to spread the lie that undocumented immigrants are receiving Social Security benefits.

They did so by displaying a chart showing “noncitizens” who were granted Social Security numbers during the Biden administration. Then, Gracias said, “These are noncitizens that are getting Social Security.” Except that’s not true, and Gracias and Musk appear to not understand what the word “noncitizens” means. The chart they displayed showed legal immigrants who were granted Social Security numbers under Biden — which has been practice throughout the existence of Social Security, and is done so that these immigrants’ wages can be used to pay into the system. Further, it’s not just Biden who has granted Social Security numbers to legal immigrants. Every president has, including Donald Trump during his first administration.

In fact, under Trump in 2017, the Social Security Administration (SSA) implemented a program called Enumeration Beyond Entry (EBE) that expedited Social Security cards to legal immigrants who arrived in the country — legally — to work. Musk and Gracias didn’t explain any of this to the crowd, which gasped in horror at the claim that millions of illegal immigrants are receiving Social Security benefits — something that is completely not true.

In today’s insane news cycle that seems to only speed up as the Trump administration steamrolls on through its first few months, I’ve found it helpful to work under the assumption that everyone involved is lying. From there, one must ask why they’re lying, and the answer is almost always that they’re trying to cover something up.

In the case of Musk and Gracias, they’re lying because they want people to think that undocumented immigrants are ripping off Social Security. Why? Probably because they want to privatize Social Security, or stop it completely and use the Social Security trust fund of $2 trillion to reach the savings that Musk has claimed his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) can achieve.

More than anything, people like Musk and Gracias are lying about this — and about dead people receiving Social Security, and about gay barbers being members of a brutal Venezuelan gang, and about university students being terrorists — because it is a distraction. What are they distracting from? Well, that’s pretty easy. They’re distracting Americans from the fact that Musk and his billionaire friends in Trump’s cabinet are in the middle of pulling off a massive bank heist. They are robbing the government for everything it has — reducing its regulatory power to make more money by letting banks charge you exorbitant overdraft fees, letting companies pollute at will to cut down on environmental costs, reducing oversight of foreign investment so they can engage in legal money laundering, and generally just being the most corrupt presidential administration in modern history.

More Doom reporting on Social Security

All of that is a lot more difficult to wrap your head around then Musk saying things like, illegal immigrants are taking your Social Security. Plus, by the time someone like me fact-checks Musk, as I did for Rolling Stone yesterday, the lie is already in the bloodstream. Tens of millions of Americans will go to bed tonight believing that undocumented immigrants are receiving Social Security benefits because they saw a clip of Musk saying so. Far fewer of them will see my story that explains not only is this not true, but the chart that Musk and Gracias displayed showed legal immigrants who are no different than Gracias’ parents where when they arrived here, and no different than Musk was when he became naturalized under U.S. law.

But Musk and Gracias don’t see this distinction. That’s probably because they saw the word “noncitizens” and confused it for “illegal immigrants.” (As did a member of Congress, Scott Perry.) But it’s also because they see themselves — a former immigrant and the child of immigrants — different from the conservative concept of immigrants: dirty brown people coming here from poor countries. Musk and Gracias are better than those people, they believe. They’re richer, for one. And that makes them smarter, they and many Americans believe — until you give them a chart that they completely misread, purposefully lie about, or some combination of both.

Are they stupid or lying? Another assumption that I’ve found helpful to work under in this second Trump administration is that all of these people are both.

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Now, some more bad news (sorry)...

DOGE and the Trump administration continue their list-making project by scooping up reams of data from government agencies. They’re surely making lists of immigrants — even legal ones — to deport, as well as political enemies that probably includes natural-born U.S. citizens. This is the subject of my reporting that I’m still working to flesh out, but suffice to say that many in the trans and immigrant communities are very concerned with DOGE and the administration’s list-making abilities.
In completely-Orwellian language news, the State Department’s official spokesperson, Tammy Bruce, says the agency will “revoke the visas of whoever it is that fits within the category of what it is we’re deciding is going to get your visa revoked.” Translation: we’ll deport whomever we feel like for whatever reason we come up with.
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