Draft:Enumeration Beyond Entry program

Overview

The Enumeration Beyond Entry program is an agreement between the Social Security Administration (SSA), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) wherein Social Security numbers and cards are supplied to non-citizens as part of the work authorization process, without requiring an additional application or an in-person visit to a local SSA office.

Public source information regarding the origin of the program is limited, but according to a letter dated December 17, 2019 from the Office of the Inspector General, the program began in October 2017 under the first Trump administration.

According to the same letter, DHS collects information during the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services' application process (Form I-765) and electronically transmits it to the SSA, thus eliminating the need for non-immigrants to file a separate SS-5 application at an SSA field office.

Beginning on April 1, 2024, under the Joe Biden Administration, the EBE program was expanded to include information from Form N-400 (Application for Naturalization).

As of April 2025, the EBE program applies to information from:

• Form I-765 - Application for Employment Authorization
• Form I-485 - Application to Register Permanent Residences or Adjust Status
• Form N-400 - Application for Naturalization

It's not clear from available sources whether Form I-485 was included as part of the program from the beginning, or if it was added in a later expansion.

Related Programs

The EBE program is very similar in concept to the Enumeration At Entry (EAE) program. Under the EAE program, any lawful permanent resident can simultaneous apply for both an immigration visa and a Social Security number using Form DS-230 or Form DS-260. As with the EBE program, the DHS will transmit the information to the SSA for automatic issuance of a Social Security number.

The primary difference between the two programs is that under EAE, DHS transmits the information to the SSA when the person is physically admitted to the United States (thus "at entry"), whereas EBE is targeted towards those who are already in the US ("beyond entry").

History of Social Security Numbers for Non-Citizens

The practice of issuing Social Security numbers to non-citizens existed long before the EBE program was established. The EBE program merely made the process more efficient by eliminating the need for extraneous applications.

As explained on the SSA web site, Congress amended the Social Security Act in the 1970s to authorize the SSA to assign Social Security numbers to all legally admitted non-citizens at entry and to anyone receiving or applying for a Federal benefit. This was done to deal with concerns over welfare fraud and illegal work done by unauthorized persons.

Media attention

The EBE program came to wider public attention in March 2025, when Elon Musk and Antonio Gracias, speaking at a town hall rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin on March 30, 2025, pushed disputed claims about non-citizens voting and receiving benefits, pointing to the dramatic rise in Social Security numbers issued to non-citizens under the Biden administration as evidence.

In a chart presented during the town hall, and using information collected from the EBE program, Gracias claimed that the number of Social Security numbers issued to non-citizens rose from 270,425 in FY2021 to 2,095,247 in FY2024.

Musk and Gracias see malfeasance behind the rising numbers, with Musk stating in the lead up to Gracias' presentation:

And this is really the thing that is causing the Democrats to lose their mind. Because they're actually spending at this point tens of billions to attract and retain illegals in the United States. It's really on that scale - it's a gigantic number. And the goal is to turn all the swing states blue.

and a few minutes later at the same event adding:

People sometimes think that under the Biden administration, that he was simply asleep at the switch. They weren't asleep at the switch — it was a massive, large-scale program to import as many illegals as possible, ultimately to change the entire voting map of the United States and disenfranchise the American people and make it a permanent deep-blue, one-party state from which there would be no escape.

However, according to former SSA Commissioner Martin O'Malley, in a March 31, 2025 interview with Rolling Stone, the numbers increased as a result of the number of lawfully admitted immigrants increasing. That, in addition to the expansion of the program to include naturalization applicants under Form N-400, explains the increase, according to Snopes.