The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement arm is requesting unfettered access to what is considered to be the most comprehensive government database of people in the United States and their most private information, including sensitive details about individual children, according to six current and former federal officials.
It is called the Federal Parent Locator Service, and it’s meant for finding people who owe child support. Granting access to the Department of Homeland Security, the officials said, would violate a federal law that explicitly limits its use to determining and collecting child support payments and a handful of other narrow purposes. But DHS’ ask is being seriously considered within the Department of Health and Human Services, which maintains the database.
The database contains the name, address, Social Security number, employer, and salary or wages of every employed person in the country, as well as the equivalent details for anyone listed in state unemployment systems. It exists so that if someone owes child support, the government can pursue them for it even if they’ve changed jobs or moved to another state.
The repository includes these personal details and employment records, updated throughout the year, for all types of people — even those who don’t have any children. Only some who work exclusively in the gig or cash economy, or who are entirely self-employed, might not be listed.
The database also names every child in the U.S. who is the subject of a state child support case, including each child’s sex, birthday and Social Security number, as well as family members’ names and relationships. And it identifies when single mothers and kids who receive child support are domestic violence victims — alongside their address.
“This is the most powerful people-finder system that the U.S. government has, and possibly that exists,” said Bethanne Barnes, who from 2019 through October of last year was a data director for the Administration for Children and Families, the subdivision of HHS that oversees the database.
Turning the child support data over to Homeland Security “would be disastrous for child support enforcement” and “would ruin the foundation of the child support program,” said Vicki Turetsky, who was commissioner of HHS’ office of child support enforcement from 2009 to 2016. Turetsky said that if this were to happen, many employers, fearful of ICE arrests of their employees or workplace raids, would consider no longer reporting new hires to the government. This in turn would degrade the ability of the system to find parents who owe payments to their kids, she said.
State child support agency leaders have been nervously messaging one another about this prospect recently, said Kate Cooper Richardson, the longtime head of Oregon’s child support program who retired in January. State officials have spent decades building trust with employers, Cooper Richardson said, reminding them that submitting their new-hire data to child support authorities is required and that sensitive information about their workers will be used only for child support enforcement and otherwise kept confidential. Some business leaders have already reached out to state administrators, she said, concerned about rumors of President Donald Trump’s administration seeking to use this data for immigration enforcement.
“And if we’re not learning from employers when a parent who owes child support gets a new job, who loses in that situation?” Cooper Richardson said. “The 1 in 5 U.S. children who rely on consistent and regular child support.”
A White House spokesperson said in a statement that “the entire Trump administration is working to lawfully implement the President’s agenda to put Americans first. Any sensitive information required to do so will be obtained and handled properly.” A DHS representative requested additional time to respond to detailed questions sent by email, which ProPublica agreed to, but DHS did not provide any responses.
Last year, Department of Government Efficiency appointees sought and for a brief period gained access to the National Directory of New Hires, the part of the child support database that contains people’s employment information. It is unclear what, if anything, the DOGE team did with this data; the federal courts temporarily blocked it from continuing to access Social Security, IRS and other sensitive records, and then DOGE disbanded last summer before final rulings on the legality of its efforts had been made.
Over the past month, though, three officials said, DHS has separately and expressly requested both the new-hire data and also the Federal Case Registry, the other half of the database where the catalog of all child support cases is housed. This has the much more sensitive specifics on families and children, including information on paternity, domestic violence and more.
It is unclear why DHS would want this, given that locating undocumented immigrants at their places of work or targeting those businesses for raids would be possible using just the employment data, without all of the case registry’s additional personal details. Whatever DHS’ intentions might be, multiple officials and privacy experts interviewed for this story expressed concern that abusers in the ranks of law enforcement would soon be able to see their victims’ case information and addresses, and that a manifest of vulnerable children would become widely available in the government.
The Department of Health and Human Services general counsel’s office, which is run by a Trump political official, must now decide whether it believes federal law allows the agency to provide DHS with the full child support database. Child support staff strongly oppose doing this, but the request is now with the lawyers, people familiar with the situation said.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may also have to approve the data sharing. If it’s approved, the department is likely to be sued by legal advocacy groups almost immediately, lawyers and experts said.
HHS did not respond to a request for comment.
Internal emails show that HHS’ Administration for Children and Families last year was also directed to cross-check all of its other datasets — on families who interact with child care, foster care, Head Start and other systems — against DHS immigration records. The Trump administration has expanded a DHS tool called SAVE to allow federal and state agencies to check the citizenship of millions of people at once, including those who rely on public assistance programs like these. (Also using this tool, the administration has consistently inaccurately flagged citizens as noncitizens on state voter rolls, ProPublica has reported.)
In DHS’ efforts to gather data from other agencies, the department has argued that several U.S. statutes allow federal law enforcement to obtain information without a warrant from any government agency pertaining to the identity and location of people living in the country illegally, especially if national security is at stake. In DHS’ view, these statutes should overrule all others, even a law that would seem to bar the department from obtaining an entire database of sensitive information about children unrelated to immigration.
Congress has previously permitted a handful of exceptions that allow certain agencies to access parts of the child support data archive. That includes using it in limited ways to help manage custody and visitation cases, to pursue people who have federal student loan debt and to check the incomes of those who apply for means-tested government programs, like housing assistance.
Maya Bernstein has overseen federal data privacy policies for over three decades, starting during the first Bush administration. In the 1990s, she helped lead the work on the creation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the medical records privacy law, before serving 20 years as the senior adviser for privacy policy at HHS. “I know a lot about a lot of different databases,” she said, and the child support database is “the one that I’m most worried about.”
“It is very unusual for them to want the Federal Case Registry,” Bernstein added, referring to the part of the database with children’s case information. “In my career, no one has asked for access to that. Most people have never even heard of it.”
