Fox’s Steve Doocy and DOGE’s Antonio Gracias fearmonger over a program started by Trump in 2017, which granted non-citizens Social Security numbers.
Doocy opened the segment on this Wednesday’s Fox & Friends showing a portion of a presentation given by Elon Musk and Gracias in Wisconsin this past Sunday, where they displayed a supposedly “mind blowing” chart showing the number of immigrants who received Social Security numbers, but, as Rolling Stone reported, there were some very crucial details they omitted:
The chart showed that noncitizens have increasingly been granted Social Security numbers, not benefits, although Musk and Antonio Gracias, a staffer with his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) did not make that distinction. “These are noncitizens that are getting Social Security,” said Gracias, a Musk ally and head of a private equity firm.
Moreover, the program to expedite the issuing of Social Security numbers to legal immigrants — the program they were specifically decrying — began during the first Trump administration.
Musk and Gracias naturally didn’t mention that, either.
The federal program to automatically mail Social Security cards to legal immigrants — called Enumeration Beyond Entry (EBE) — began while Donald Trump was in office in 2017, according to a 2019 Social Security Administration (SSA) inspector general’s report.
