DHS Sparks Outrage as Trump Officials Seek Access to Database Holding Sensitive Data on Children and Abuse Victims

The Trump administration's immigration enforcement arm is seeking unrestricted access to what experts describe as the most comprehensive government database of people in the United States, a system built to protect children and domestic violence survivors, not track immigrants.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has requested full access to the Federal Parent Locator Service (FPLS), a set of databases held within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that contains the name, address, Social Security number, employer and salary of every employed person in the country, according to ProPublica, which cited six current and former federal officials.

The system also identifies every child in the United States who is subject to a state child support case, including each child's date of birth, sex and Social Security number and flags domestic violence victims alongside their home addresses. Multiple current and former HHS officials told both ProPublica and CNN that granting DHS access would violate a federal statute that explicitly restricts the database's use to child support enforcement and a handful of narrowly defined purposes.

Database Contents Never Meant for Immigration Enforcement

The FPLS is not simply a child support ledger. It incorporates the National Directory of New Hires (NDNH), a sub-database that receives new-hire reports from employers across all 50 states within days of a worker starting a job. Those records cover virtually the entire American workforce, citizens, permanent residents, visa holders and undocumented workers alike, regardless of any connection to child support proceedings.

The NDNH is, in the words of Bethanne Barnes, who served as a data director for HHS's Administration for Children and Families (ACF) from 2019 through late last year, 'the most powerful people-finder system that the U.S. government has, and possibly that exists.'

Separately, the FPLS includes the Federal Case Registry (FCR), which names every child in the country who is subject to a child support order, together with family relationship data. Critically, the FCR flags cases involving domestic violence survivors to prevent their whereabouts from being disclosed during enforcement proceedings.

That protection is written directly into 42 U.S.C. § 653, the governing federal statute, which states, 'No information shall be disclosed to any person if the State has notified the Secretary that the State has reasonable evidence of domestic violence or child abuse and the disclosure of such information could be harmful to the custodial parent or the child of such parent.'

The statute's authorised purposes are tightly defined, including establishing and enforcing child support obligations and verifying eligibility for a small number of federal benefit programmes such as SNAP and TANF. Immigration enforcement is not among them, and DHS is not listed as an authorised user.

Threats to Domestic Violence Victims and the Child Support System

Officials and privacy experts interviewed by ProPublica identified two overlapping dangers in the DHS request. The first is concrete and immediate: abusers who work in law enforcement could, if DHS gains broad access to the FPLS, search the system and find the addresses of victims who have fled and whose locations the child support system is legally required to protect.

'Any sensitive information required to do so will be obtained and handled properly,' a White House spokesperson said in an on-record statement on 11 March 2026, but officials who know the database's architecture say that assurance does not address how the data would be partitioned or controlled once DHS holds it.

The second risk is structural. State child support agencies have spent decades persuading employers that submitting new-hire data is both legally required and genuinely confidential. Cooper Richardson, executive director of the Association of Child Support Directors, told ProPublica that business leaders had already begun reaching out to state administrators, alarmed by reports of the administration's intentions.

'And if we're not learning from employers when a parent who owes child support gets a new job, who loses in that situation?' she asked. 'The 1 in 5 U.S. children who rely on consistent and regular child support.'

The NDNH's breadth compounds those concerns. Immigration status is not a field in the database and cannot be directly searched. However, as Turetsky explained to CNN, it can be inferred. "All American workers would have their data exposed through the NDNH should DHS get ahold of it," they said.

An undocumented worker may be identified simply by the absence of a Social Security number, or its format, in a record that spans millions of people who have no connection whatsoever to child support. That means the impact of access would extend far beyond undocumented immigrants to every person in the workforce.

DOGE's Earlier Attempt and Senate Questions Remain Unanswered

DHS's current request is not the first time the Trump administration has sought entry into the FPLS. In early 2025, operatives from Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) reportedly attempted to access the same database. On 10 April 2025, Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, joined by six Democratic and Independent colleagues, sent a formal letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent demanding a full account of what DOGE had accessed and why.

The senators' letter specified that career HHS employees had 'been silenced, ignored, and even potentially purged for refusing to cooperate with DOGE's illegal request.' It demanded a Finance Committee briefing and asked the agencies to produce any legal analysis conducted under 42 U.S.C. § 653, including whether the HHS general counsel had issued a written memorandum opinion, as the office had done in 2011 when considering whether the Government Accountability Office could access the database. No public response to those questions has been published. The senators' letter remains publicly available on the Senate Finance Committee website.

The DOGE episode and the new DHS request reveal a recurring pattern, with the administration's immigration enforcement apparatus repeatedly identifying legally protected databases and seeking to bring them within its reach. HHS told CNN in response to March 2026 reporting that the Administration for Children and Families 'has not received a request by DHS to access the Federal Parent Locator Service,' a formulation that left open whether discussions were taking place at a higher level of the department.

The most powerful people-finder system in the United States government was built to find absent parents and protect their children, and the administration that now wants to repurpose it has already been told once, by a federal court, that privacy laws are not optional.