The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement division is demanding unfettered access to the most comprehensive government database of people in the United States and the most personal information, including sensitive information about individual children, according to six current and former federal officials.
It’s called the Federal Parent Locator Service, and its purpose is to find people who are obligated to pay child support. Officials said allowing access to the Department of Homeland Security would violate federal law that specifically limits its use to determining and collecting child support and several other narrow purposes. But DHS’ request is being seriously considered within the Department of Health and Human Services, which manages the database.
This database contains the name, address, social security number, employer, salary or wages of every employer in the country, as well as comparable details for those enrolled in state unemployment systems. This system exists so that if someone owes child support, the government can claim it even if that person changes jobs or moves to another state.
This repository is updated throughout the year and contains personal information and employment records for all kinds of people, including those without children. Some people who only work in the gig or cash economy, or are completely self-employed, may not be on the list.
The database also lists the names of all children in the United States who are the subject of state child support cases, and includes each child’s gender, date of birth, social security number, and family names and relationships. It also identifies when single mothers and children receiving child support are victims of domestic violence, along with their address.
“This is the most powerful person search system that the U.S. government has, and probably exists,” said Bethanne Burns, who from 2019 until last October was data director for the Office of Children and Families, the division of HHS that oversees the database.
Vicki Turetsky, who served as director of the HHS Child Support Enforcement Office from 2009 to 2016, said turning over child support data to the Department of Homeland Security would be “disastrous for child support enforcement” and would “undermine the foundation of the child support program.” If this were to happen, Turetsky said, many employers would consider not reporting new hires to the government for fear of ICE arrests and workplace raids. She said this would reduce the system’s ability to find parents who owe payments to their children.
Kate Cooper Richardson, the longtime head of Oregon’s child support program who retired in January, said leaders of the state child support agency have been nervously sending each other messages in recent days about the prospect. Cooper-Richardson said state officials have spent decades building trusting relationships with employers, warning them that new employees’ data must be submitted to child support authorities and that sensitive information about employees will be used only for child support enforcement and will otherwise be treated as confidential. He said some business leaders have already contacted state officials, concerned about rumors that President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to use the data to crack down on immigration.
“And if the parent who owes child support doesn’t learn from their employer when they take a new job, who loses in that situation?” Cooper-Richardson said. “One in five children in the United States relies on consistent, regular child support.”
“The entire Trump administration is working to lawfully carry out the President’s policy of putting the American people first, and all the classified information necessary to do that will be obtained and handled appropriately,” a White House spokesperson said in a statement. A DHS representative requested additional time to respond to detailed questions sent via email, which ProPublica agreed to, but DHS did not provide any answers.
Last year, appointees at the Department of Government Efficiency briefly sought access to the National Directory of New Employers, part of the child support database that contains national employment information. It’s unclear what the DOGE team did with this data. A federal court temporarily blocked continued access to Social Security, IRS and other sensitive records, and DOGE was dissolved last summer before a final ruling on the legality of its efforts could be reached.
But over the past month, three officials said, DHS has separately and explicitly requested both new hire data and the other half of the database, the Federal Case Register, where a catalog of all child support cases is kept. This includes more sensitive details about families and children, including information such as paternity and domestic violence.
It is unclear why DHS would want to do this, given that employment data alone can be used to identify the workplaces of illegal immigrants and target those businesses for raids, even without all the additional personal information included in case registries. Whatever DHS’ intentions, multiple officials and privacy experts interviewed for this article expressed concern that abusers in the ranks of law enforcement would soon be able to see victims’ case information and addresses, and that vulnerable children’s manifests would become widely available within the government.
The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of General Counsel, which is run by Trump’s top political officials, will now have to decide whether it believes federal law allows the agency to provide DHS with a complete child support database. Those in charge of child support strongly oppose this, but they are currently requesting a lawyer, people familiar with the matter said.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may also have to approve data sharing. If approved, the department would likely be sued almost immediately by legal advocacy groups, lawyers and experts say.
HHS did not respond to a request for comment.
HHS’ Office of Children and Families was directed last year to match all other data sets on families in child care, foster care, Head Start and other systems with DHS immigration records, according to internal emails. The Trump administration expanded a DHS tool called SAVE to allow federal and state authorities to verify the citizenship of millions of people at once, including those who rely on such public assistance programs. (Also, using this tool, the administration continued to inaccurately report citizens as noncitizens on state voter rolls, ProPublica reported.)
In DHS’ efforts to collect data from other agencies, the department argued that several U.S. statutes allow federal law enforcement to obtain information about the identity and location of people in the country illegally without a warrant from a government agency, especially when national security is at stake. In DHS’s view, these laws should override all other laws, even those that would prohibit the department from obtaining an entire database of sensitive information about non-immigrant children.
Congress has previously granted some exceptions to allow certain agencies access to portions of the child support data archive. This includes limited use to help manage custody and visitation, track people with federal student loan debt, and verify the income of people applying for means-tested government programs such as housing assistance.
Maya Bernstein has overseen federal data privacy policy for more than 30 years, beginning during the first Bush administration. In the 1990s, she led work on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, a medical records privacy law, and then served as senior advisor for privacy policy at HHS for 20 years. “I’m very familiar with the different databases,” she said, and the child support database “is the one I’m most concerned about.”
“It’s very unusual for them to want a federal case registry,” Bernstein added, noting that part of the database includes case information for children. “No one in my career has asked for access to this. Most people have never even heard of it.”
