Tuesday, April 23`, 2025
Year : 2, Issue: 34
Agencies: The Trump administration’s unofficial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been given access to a sensitive Justice Department system with detailed records on millions of immigrants, both legal and undocumented, according to a report by The Washington Post.
The Executive Office for Immigration Review’s Courts and Appeals System (ECAS) is a Justice Department database containing electronic records on millions of legal and undocumented immigrants since the 1990s, including names, addresses, court testimony, law enforcement history, and confidential asylum interviews.
About six DOGE advisers were granted access to the ECAS database by Justice Department officials, with staff instructed to create accounts for the team.
The group includes former hedge fund employee Adam Hoffman, private-equity associates Payton Rehling and Jon Koval—linked to an Elon Musk-affiliated firm—and Marko Elez, who was rehired after briefly resigning over a controversy involving racist social media posts.
This follows other attempts by DOGE to access federal systems as part of the Trump administration’s broader strategy to use federal data in support of its deportation agenda.
Last week, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials, working with DOGE, sought access to a sensitive Medicare database to locate undocumented individuals. DOGE also directed the Social Security Administration to falsely list over 6,000 immigrants as deceased to pressure them to self-deport.
An anonymous ECAS official told The Washington Post that access is usually limited to lawyers and investigators, though some Department of Homeland Security (DHS) staff, including Customs and Border Protection and ICE, may access it for immigration court appeals.
“It’s every record of every interaction immigrants have had with the US government in any way,” the official added.
