People protest against ICE’s arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil outside the Newark courthouse on March 27, 2025, in Newark, N.J. by Kena Betancur/VIEWpress/Corbis via Getty Donald Trump’s administration moved this week to declare thousands of immigrants dead. The 6,000-plus very-much-alive people, predominantly undocumented immigrants from Latin America, continue to eat, sleep, breathe, and work on U.S. soil. Their names have nonetheless been added to the Social Security Administration’s “death master file,” the database used to list dead people who should no longer receive benefits. The New York Times, the first to report on the perverse repurposing of the death...