Transcript of 888: Not Today, Hades! New

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From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ike Srisakandarajah, in for Ira Glass. Pablo, does this feel like an Icarus story to you?

Maybe. Potentially.

What part?

Well, Icarus dies. Not that part.

This is Pablo Manriquez, and he recently survived his own personal Greek tragedy. He's a reporter in Washington, D.C. I've known him for years. And this all began when a ripped-open package showed up on his front stoop.

It's late winter 2022. I find a box outside of my apartment. Inside is a canvas, a couple—

like, four—

the four primary colors, a paintbrush, and a palette. It just seems like a sign.

Yeah.

So—

And that's, like, What's the sign?

It was just, I thought to myself, somebody painted every painting in the Capitol and the White House and the Department of Justice. All these agency buildings, they have oil paintings. And yet in the 15 years that I've been in Washington, I've never met an oil painter.

He had this light bulb moment. That could be him. No! No! It wasn't the first time he decided to become a new Pablo. When we first met, he was doing PR work, but he decided he wanted to be a reporter no matter what. So at 37, he moved into a flop house and began freelancing for small publications. And now he spends his days chasing down politicians in the halls of Congress. He made it happen. So with these art supplies, he began to imagine this other life for himself. And he made a Pablo kind of plan.

So I was like, if I become an oil painter, I would basically be the only oil painter I know. And in some sense have like a monopoly on oil painting in Washington. You know what I mean? Like if you want an oil painting, especially a portrait, you have to come to me.

What Pablo lacks in skill and experience, he compensates for with heat-seeking opportunism and blinding self-confidence. It can rub people the wrong way, but I appreciate the hustle. Pablo, it's so funny to me that you're trying to pick one career in a— I can say it— a dying industry by supplementing your income with another dying industry.

Reporting an artist. It's like the two poorest.

It's—

it didn't make any sense. To a lot of people.

But it made sense to Pablo. Pablo looked down at the new tools in his hands, and then tilted his head skyward. Even as Icarus did before him, he saw a way to soar where no mortal had dared to soar. Our show today: Myths in Real Life. What happened next to Pablo? Other daring actions by mortals challenging their small lives. And a cameo by a real-life god. Because, you know, the gods get mad if you don't include them. And I'm too busy to get smote. Not today, Hades. Stay with us. It's This American Life. Act 1: Icarus. So Pablo Manriquez in Washington, D.C. had received these art supplies, perhaps discarded by an Amazon package thief, or perhaps a gift from the gods. And he figured there's all these big egos in town who would love to be memorialized in oil portraits. Well, I could do that for them. Even though Pablo himself had never painted a portrait in his life. Or painted anything for that matter.

I had sort of a clear vision in mind of what I needed to do. I needed to learn how to paint a face.

Politicians have them. You can't sell a portrait without one. Pablo finds a YouTube channel called PaintCoach. It has a 10-minute crash course. He follows along. He starts moving paint around on the canvas. And he's hooked. In his head, he's already competing with the legends who are hanging on walls around town. He just needs a first subject to paint. It's gotta be someone widely recognizable, someone distinct and iconic. So he picks Mitch McConnell.

He's always had super, super loyal staffers. I mean, I imagine he's, according to his book, "The Long Game," he's run out all his enemies. And installed all of his friends. So I was hoping to find Mitch McConnell fans to buy Mitch McConnell paintings. Another thing I did, I looked up on Etsy, I looked up on the typical places where you would go to buy an oil painting, and I couldn't find any oil paintings of Mitch McConnell. If I painted 5 paintings of Mitch McConnell in a week, I had the only 5 paintings of Mitch McConnell in existence for sale, right?

After a few tries, he gets one that looks enough like Mitch McConnell. So he posts a few pictures of his progress, and someone notices. The next day.

I was walking through the Senate, and one of his aides kind of came out of the woodwork and was just like, "Hey, man, these paintings of our boss that you're posting on Instagram are really cool, but could you maybe paint him smiling, you know?" I was just like, boom, hell yeah, I can paint them smiling. I can paint them smiling. Whoa. All day long.

Have you ever had a picture in your office of your boss smiling at you? If you have, you might be living in a country where the name "leader" is preceded by "great" or "supreme." I'd like to take this moment to say I am grateful to work here at This American Life, where the company reimburses half the cost of the smiling portrait of Ira that we are forced to hang in our offices. Pablo delivers his first smiling senator to Mitch McConnell's staffer. And then he gets a request for another and another. He's 18 Mitch McConnells deep before he stops to catch his breath. Were those Mitch McConnells, in your opinion, Were they good?

I can't think of a single Mitch McConnell I ever did that was good.

But they were good enough. He sold the first small one for $25, the next one for $50. Eventually he settled on $500 for 24 by 36-inch paintings. Pablo is becoming a prolific painter. He paints Nancy Pelosi, Ilhan Omar, other politicians. He takes a commission for a lobbyist's dog. Just by his own force of personality, he's making it happen. At the State of the Union, Pablo set up an easel in Statuary Hall that's overlooking where all the members of Congress and the Supreme Court justices pass through. And Pablo, in his white painter's coat with headphones on, He captured the scene on canvas live. Here, this is something that is a side project of yours? C-SPAN interviewed him as he painted. And then late last year in December, he got a phone call from a friend's number, someone who used to be a policy advisor in the executive branch.

I picked up and I was just like, "Hey man, what do you need? I'm kind of busy." I hear on the other end of the line, "Hey Pablo, you're a great artist. This is Joe Biden." I'm like, bullshit bad, like very funny, right? Um, he's like, no, no, no, I'm serious. Hey Jill, put on FaceTime. And bloop, bloop, bloop, like the FaceTime noise plays. And I'm looking at Dr. Jill Biden and I'm like, oh my God, I'm so sorry, ma'am. I'm so sorry for cursing. I did not mean to say BS in front of you. Uh, yeah, this is real. And she handed the phone back over to Joe Biden and he was just like, you're a really good artist. This is a really great portrait of Jill and me.

If you've been wondering what Joe Biden's been up to since leaving office, well, mystery solved.

He knew the photo that it came from. It was from the 1970s when they first met. So it was an oil painting of them when they were young. And I was on FaceTime with the president. There were probably 25 reporters in the press gallery filing their stories. And pretty soon they were all gathered around me and we were all talking to Joe Biden, you know, like the Washington Post, the AP, like the Bloomberg, HuffPost. We're all talking— Fox News, Daily Caller, we're all looking into the camera and talking to Joe Biden, and he's just telling everybody how bomb my painting is. I was like, that was awesome. That was awesome.

This is the part of the story when Icarus, with wings cobbled together with wax and feathers, experiences the miracle of flight. Hey, I can see my minotaur from here. When for many mortals, this level of success is thrilling and enough. But not for Pablo. Pablo has a bigger goal. He wants one of his paintings officially hung in the capital, approved by a committee and hung by an entity known as the Architect of the Capital, the only people allowed to drive a nail in the wall. Pablo wants to be immortalized in these halls of power.

I have no legacy. Like, you know what I mean? And while no one might remember any story I write ever, right, the painting will be there for centuries. Centuries if it's on the wall.

Maybe you've been wondering this whole time, what do these paintings look like? So to be totally honest, Pablo's improved a lot, but he's doing work that looks like it's made by a talented art student, maybe a folk artist. The colors are pleasing. You can always tell who it is he's painting. But it's not, you know, John Trumbull's painting of the founders signing the Declaration of Independence or any of the other museum-grade paintings hanging in the Capitol Rotunda. Of course, that does not stop Pablo. And a couple months ago, he saw a way to make his dream happen. In February, the House voted to rename the Press Gallery after Frederick Douglass, who, among many other things, was also also the first Black reporter to cover the Capitol. There was going to be a little renaming ceremony and press conference. Well, it just so happened that Pablo had made a portrait of Frederick Douglass. It had been leaning against the wall in the press gallery for the last 2 years. So Pablo quickly hatched a plan. He's gonna grab his painting, sneak his painting into the room where the ceremony is going to take place, and slip it onto a table where everyone can see it.

I scoped out the room. I was like, "Oh, there are artifacts about Frederick Douglass here." Like, there was this ledger of sales and stuff like that under glass. I was like, "I'm gonna go grab my painting and put it on a table." And I did. It's like a pop art portrait of Frederick Douglass with a yellow background, like a distinct yellow background.

It's a pretty big canvas, nearly life-sized, and it sticks out. Compared to, say, the items on loan from the Library of Congress. But nobody says anything. Then the VIPs come in. There's the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, Representative Byron Donalds, the bill sponsor, and there's even a living descendant of Frederick Douglass. Traditionally, at a press conference like this, the press are there to cover the event, not insert themselves into it. But Pablo is Pablo.

And when Mike Johnson came in, I showed it to him. I showed it to Byron Donalds. He's like, "Oh yeah, there." And that's when Frederick Douglass's grandson was like, "That's great.

That's great." Probably not grandson.

And then they kept walking. So I was like, "Okay, so Frederick Douglass's grandson is cool with this. Byron Donalds is cool with this.

Speaker Johnson is cool with this." He gets a selfie with the lawmakers and his painting.

Everybody loves the painting. So let's get it hung on the wall officially.

To do that, Pablo just needs the permission of something called the Standing Committee of Correspondents. These are a group of Pablo's own peers, other working journalists. So he writes them a letter donating his painting to the committee and asking that they hang it in the newly named Frederick Douglass Press Gallery. A couple weeks later, the Standing Committee of Correspondents meet. The first new business on the agenda that day is to take a vote regarding artwork.

And they voted no. They said no. I was just like, "Oh my God." I still don't know exactly why.

Did you ask any of them? No. Pablo was not discouraged by this decision. Of course he wasn't. He was like, "Well, if they don't like this Frederick Douglass, I'm gonna make them a much bigger Frederick Douglass. And if they don't like that, I'll paint a smaller one. And I'll keep painting and donating Frederick Douglasses until the dam breaks and they all go up." I thought that sounded like a lot of work. At least more than, you know, asking them why they said no. So I reached out and got a hold of the meeting minutes. The problem was not about the size or the quality or anything like that. The problem was that Pablo had crossed a line. The thing that they voted on wasn't at all about your painting, but a broad rule that would apply to all future situations.

What was the rule?

You don't bring a painting? No, it's not don't bring a painting. It was that no credentialed reporter will be able to make artwork that hangs on the walls of the Capitol. Is this the first time you're hearing that? Yeah.

That's written down?

Yeah, it was a 4-to-1 vote. Now, how does that make you feel?

Kind of sad.

According to a statement from the standing committee, they were worried about what precedent it would set, what conflicts of interests hanging his painting could cause. And Pablo hadn't gotten permission. From the event organizers to put his painting into their event. Icarus, son of Daedalus, soaring over the isle, was enthralled by his own new ability. He couldn't help wanting to go higher. Pablo, son of Luis, didn't want to only stay in the back of the press conference with the other scribes. Couldn't this event to honor Frederick Douglass also honor Pablo too? Maybe if he'd asked permission, gone through channels, this all might have worked out differently. I floated that idea by Pablo.

Was there another way to do it? Yeah. But I still think this was the best way.

Even when you're thinking about it now, reflecting on it?

Yeah, because the humility could not possibly have created that scenario to begin with. At every point along the way, it was driven by ego.

A lot of it was ego.

Maybe like 91, 92%. I definitely wake up every morning excited to be Pablo Mériquez.

Ego. It's what makes you pick up a box of stolen art supplies and think, without any experience, I will be a transformational force in the U.S. Capitol. But it's also ego that propels you to the front of a press conference with your painting under your arm and sends you crashing back to Earth. The Potomac is lousy with wax and feathers. A couple hours after we talk, Pablo sends me a note. He's back in the Capitol. He says for the first time, he feels small in this place that once made him feel big. The next day, he sends me another note. He sounds like himself again. He figured it out. He's launching his campaign to run for standing committee.

But luckily, I'm not eligible to run for the Standing Committee for at least another year, if not two. So I decided that while I can't be on the ballot until probably 2028, I am going to start campaigning on Monday. So I registered the domain dailypressgallery.com and I started writing an agenda. Part of my agenda is, of course, to repeal the prohibition that they put on journalist art in the Capitol.

You never hear about Icarus the next day. Did you know he just made some small adjustments to his wings and headed right back for the sun? If you want to see Pablo's paintings or follow his campaign for standing committee, he's @pablo.manriquez on Instagram. That brings us to Act 2: Cerberus. You know how in Greek mythology there's Hades, where everyone goes when they die? You gotta cross the River Styx to get there. And then there's this gate with this three-headed dog, Cerberus. He's guarding the entrance, and he's supposed to make sure only actually dead people enter. This story is about a real person in America who stood at those very gates, which is not the easiest job, it turns out. At least not right now. Nadia Raymond talked to him about it.

When Jeremiah Scofield started working at the Social Security Administration, the SSA, the first thing his boss said to him was, "If you're looking up your ex's records, your own records, or looking up someone famous, don't. We will know." Then they made him read Title V of the U.S. Code, Section 552, the Privacy Act, the actual legal text of it. That's how much they wanted to drive the point home. The Social Security Administration is the caretaker of these truly massive databases of personal information. They use it to send Social Security checks, disability payments, and in order to do that accurately, given how there's over 300 million of us, they keep master files. Jeremiah says they have all sorts of information from all sorts of moments in your life: where you were born, your Social Security number, your mom's maiden name. Your citizenship status, all of it stored in giant files.

Your master earnings files will show every job that you were— you ever worked at, and it would show how much money you made at all of those different jobs.

Every job people have had?

Yep. And then you have the disability control file, which actually gets into disability-related information.

That's for people who collect disability.

Things like what your disability you know, there's like listings of codes for if you have, you know, like a cancer or if you have some other type of ailment. And so it would have all of that information in it.

Okay.

And then— So it's very, it's very sensitive information. We've, at Social Security, we've always treated those records as though they're, they're things that they cannot be let out to anybody.

Like they contain people's whole lives, basically.

That's right. At very sensitive moments in their lives.

The point of the many rules governing these lists and files is not just privacy, though. It's about making sure all this information is used only for its intended purpose. By the book. And Jeremiah, from what I can tell, is a by-the-book kind of guy. There's one database with arguably more power than the others, and a name to match. It's called the Death Master File. It's a master list of all the dead. Well, all the deaths recorded since the dawn of Social Security. It has millions and millions of names. People get added to it when they die, their name and their date of death. If you get accidentally added to it when you are not dead, it can mess up your Social Security payments, sure, but also your bank accounts, all kinds of things. So Jeremiah and everyone treated this one with extreme care. And one day, Jeremiah says, he was summoned to a meeting. And the first thing he sees when he enters the meeting room, handwritten on all these whiteboards, are the names of all these databases, including the Death Master file. The whole meeting was kind of strange, actually. Jeremiah was a boss.

At this point, he had been there 25 years, his first proper adult job. So he'd been to a lot of meetings. But none like this. It was not put on the official calendar, and the whole thing was very secretive. It was in a half-used office building. There was a guard in the hallway, almost like a bouncer. And in the room, 3 people with non-government laptops. This was February of last year, and these guys, they worked for DOJ, so-called Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk. In the meeting, Jeremiah makes some proposals, some ways Social Security can be more efficient, better IT to update these lists quicker. But he's almost instantly interrupted by one of the Doge guys, Antonio Gracias, a venture capitalist, now Team Elon.

And within 2 minutes, Mr. Gracias had shut down the conversation and said, we're here to talk about Social Security fraud and we're looking for a big win And, you know, I said, well, a big win. I mean, I have millions of dollars in potential savings by doing these new IT systems. And he said he was only willing to go to the president with, with a big win of, you know, he said $50 billion savings.

What did you say?

Well, what I said was that I don't think you're going to find $50 billion in fraud.

Around this time, Elon Musk announced on X that they might have found some fraud. The fraud was related to the Death Master File. Musk was pointing to a problem with it, namely that there were people who were clearly dead who were not in it, people who seemed to be 150 years old according to other Social Security databases. He posted quote, "Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security." He even brought it up in the Oval Office with President Trump before the cameras.

Now, do you know anyone who has 150? I don't. Okay.

They should be on the Guinness Book of World Records.

They're missing out.

Jeremiah saw all this.

So in layman's terms, I was pissed off that our leaders in the country were saying this, and You know, it was infuriating.

Jeremiah was pissed off because, in layman's terms, shit's complicated. It's true that there were some people who appeared to be 150 not marked as dead, but the Social Security Administration knew that already, and they knew why. Sometimes the death of a person born in 1875 or whatever didn't get reported to the SSA, and without an official death date, that person didn't go on the Death Master File. Regardless, there was a whole system in place to make sure Social Security payments did not go out to these people. Because when someone is over 100, the Social Security Administration actually contacts them to make sure they're still alive.

And so we have different groupings of technicians within the agency that literally make phone calls to these folks and in some cases go to people's houses just to make sure, hey, Jeremiah's over 100 years old. Let's make sure that he's still living and that he's receiving the benefits that he needs to.

He says some of these 100-plus-year-olds are happy to have a visitor. Others are like, go away, of course I'm alive. And if there's any fraud, anyone taking in a paycheck for a dead relative, the SSA would catch it. Plus, the SSA had already tried to clean up the Death Master File, specifically chasing down death dates for these 150-plus-year-olds. But it took a lot of time and resources, and it didn't save the government any money because it's not like the SSA had been sending checks to these dead people. So the opposite of efficiency. But DOJ still pressed on. They wanted Jeremiah's team to mark these apparent 150-year-olds as dead and mark them now. Just populate the sensitive list with random death dates, which was totally unheard of, and it made Jeremiah a little nervous. It seemed like a bad precedent, 'cause remember, if you make a mistake in the death master file, say, mark someone dead who isn't, it's not just their Social Security that gets shut off. Anything tied to their Social Security number is now bricked. The person finds out, often in pretty dramatic fashion, that they've been killed off by accident. Like, they go to the grocery store, they try to pay with their credit card, and it doesn't work.

Then they try to pay with another credit card. Same thing.

So they go home and call the bank, and they're like, "What's going on?" And they would have been directed to go to Social Security to fix the problem.

Would they— could they have access to their money in their bank accounts or no?

The bank accounts would have been frozen.

Oh my God. So it's not even that they can't use credit cards, they can't, like, take money that they have in the bank out of the bank at all.

That's right. Everything just stops because everybody thinks that the person is deceased.

It's a mess. And now here was Doge insisting Jeremiah's team mark these 150-plus-year-olds as dead. Jeremiah was like, okay, I know we don't have physical proof, but if the date of birth is right, logic says these people are for sure dead. So it didn't seem that risky. They did it methodically, carefully, to avoid making mistakes, but ultimately they put in fake death dates for all those people. Jeremiah didn't like it, but he did it anyway. This fixation with the Death Master file, little did Jeremiah know, it was just beginning. A few weeks after the 150-year-olds, Jeremiah says his higher-ups contacted him with a request from DHS. The Department of Homeland Security. And this request was unlike anything Jeremiah had seen in his more than 20 years at the agency.

I got a request from the Deputy Commissioner for Operations, my boss, and said, we have a listing of 6— a little over 6,000 people. You need to come up with a strategy on how we're going to kill off these 6,000 folks. The listing we had received from DHS— kill off, like Uh, yeah, she— DHS had sent us a list, and the expectation was, is that we add a date of death for these individuals.

To add these 6,000 or so names to the Death Master File. It was strange because normally deaths are reported by funeral homes or family members or some state authority. And also, there was no indication from DHS that these people were dead. They just said add these people to this list. So Jeremiah and his colleagues were trying to figure out what's going on and why these 6,000 in particular. Like, oh, is there a pattern here? Like, is it all— like, is it all people from one area of the country? Is it like— there was no nothing like that that you were able to see?

I did not see it, but there were conversations that happened, and the conversations that happened around the agency indicated that it was mostly Hispanic last names.

DHS also sent a memo from then-Secretary of Homeland Security Christie Noem about, quote, "suspected terrorists" who she said had Social Security numbers and access to our financial system. She asked the SSA to stop it in a way that was, quote, "consistent with law." Jeremiah was pretty sure none of this request to mark 6,000 people as dead was lawful. No proof of death, for one thing. So he says he goes and asks someone at the Social Security Office of General Counsel. The lawyers, who tell him, yes, it is illegal.

The illegal part of it is, is making them all dead. You can't just make anybody dead that's not dead. That's against the law.

So Jeremiah and his team refuse. But then within a couple of days, they start getting some strange reports from the field offices. Workers calling in saying, "What's going on? People are showing up here saying we marked them as dead." They're definitely not dead.

I'm like, did somebody process these 6,000 deaths? And we started to ask around the agency at headquarters, and we found out that there were staff in the Office of Chief Information Officer that had posted the dates of death.

He knew the Chief Information Officer staff did it because that was the only office that could process these deaths the way they were processed. All at once. Jeremiah says all 6,000-some people had been marked as having died on a single day, March 8th, 2025. He couldn't believe they had done this.

I mean, by the agency choosing to do this, we just took a list without any documentation and we posted these 6,000 deaths That could have happened to anybody. And within 48 hours, that anybody would have had their lives halted until they could fix it. And it's possible they could fix it in a few days. Or there's been cases where we've seen where it takes months or even a year to fix all of the little things that get screwed up because you got your name on the Death Master File.

The process of getting resurrected— that's what they call it when you're accidentally killed in the Death Master File and need to be brought back to life— it's not simple. You have to go into your Social Security office in person and prove you're alive. And sometimes it takes multiple visits as you keep encountering new corners of your life where some institution or other is still convinced you're dead. Jeremiah doesn't tell the field offices that the 6,000 or so were secretly killed by the Chief Information Officer's office. Or that DHS requested it. He's like, "Let's not dwell on the mess. Let's just fix it. And let's fix it the way we normally would, as any other mistake in the Death Master file." Which meant it was up to each one of these 6,000 or so people to come into their local field office and prove they're alive.

We saw 30 resurrections happen pretty quickly. And then that number quickly grew within a few weeks to 300 resurrections.

So that's what was happening on the ground.

Meanwhile, from above—

We were getting pressure to say, "We told you to kill off the 6,000.

We want the 6,000 to remain dead." DHS was telling you that they wanted the 6,000 to remain dead?

That's right. And it was coming down from, you know, pretty high-up leadership.

When these 6,000 fake deaths happened, The Washington Post found out and published a big story. So did the New York Times. So as the news breaks, Jeremiah is also dealing with the chaotic media fallout of this. And then something bigger happens, and this part of the story has not been out there before. Jeremiah is the first person to talk about it.

So then fast forward a few weeks and a new request comes in to, uh, kill off a new grouping of people. The new request from DHS is for 2.7 million names.

DHS wants the SSA to kill off 2.7 million people. Like, an entire city. Mark them all as dead in the Death Master File. Again, like last time, no signer pretends that they're for real dead. DHS tells Jeremiah's team that these 2.7 million are here illegally. And also—

These folks were violent criminals and suspected terrorists.

But wait, they told you there were 2.7 million violent criminals and terrorists? That's a lot of violent criminals and suspected terrorists.

It is.

We were pretty suspect about this 2.7 million list. And so when it came in, we also thought it was a pretty big number, and we wondered whether or not the list was accurate.

Last time this happened, when Jeremiah said, "Wait a minute, these people are alive," that didn't stop the SSA from marking them as dead. So this time, he tries something different. He decides to fact-check the claims DHS made about the 2.7 million. They can't look at all 2.7 million people—privacy concerns, and also the number is so large—but they do get permission to look at a random sample from the list. 25 people.

They check what they can. And so we went through to check: one, are they dead? Two, are they here legally or not legally? And what is their current status?

When Jeremiah's team ran the numbers, they found that all 25 from the sample were alive. And what's more—

When we went through the 25 records, we found 23 of them were records where people were either US citizens or lawful permanent resident or were here legally. And then there were 2 that more investigation needed to occur because it appeared as though that their alien status had expired.

So alive and also most of them clearly in the country legally. Here's what else he remembers from the sample.

But I do remember that it did span a pretty big age community. So it was children all the way up to people in their 70s. There's a couple of cases that I remember that we just thought were super curious. Hmm. You know, there were some teenagers on the list, and we're like, "Okay, so teenagers are suspected terrorists and violent criminals?" I mean, I guess that could happen, but the likelihood of it happening didn't make sense. And then there was another person on the list that was a person that had been in the United States for over 50 years. And was receiving widow benefits. And we're like, "Okay, so this person's a violent criminal and a suspected terrorist." So Jeremiah is like, one, I can't mark people who are alive as dead.

Two, they told us these were all people without status, and that seems to not be true. And three, the data I did see from the list makes me side-eye that they're even criminals. Too many red flags in a row. He decides to sound the alarm.

I went to my boss, and my boss at the time was now Steven Evangelista. He had taken over after my other boss left the agency. And I said, "We need to have a meeting with DHS, and we need to talk through a couple of things because we think their list is inaccurate." Mm-hmm. And that's probably a light way of saying that.

So he calls this meeting. They get DHS on a video call. And on the call, Jeremiah says they present their findings, but the people on the list are alive and seem to be here legally. DHS is like, okay, we'll get you a new list. But Jeremiah has another question. Logistically, he asks, if there are mistakes on this or any other list you give us, how would a person on the list by mistake fix it? And John Koval, a DOJ guy at DHS, says They would go in person to an SSA office, same as any other mistake. Oh, but when they get there, just flag them over for ICE. Jeremiah says he looked at his coworker and they were visibly really uncomfortable. ICE is not a place where immigrants who have a mistake on any kind of government papers go to get them straightened out. It's where they go get deported. Jeremiah looks at his boss, Steven Evangelista. To Jeremiah: DHS's intention is now crystal clear.

And so we were like, "Okay, thank you for the information." We wrapped up the call. Then I had a— then we're still in the room, and I look across the table. I remember sitting across the table from Stephen, and I said, "The reason that they're doing this with this $2.7 million is because they're trying to deport all of these people. It's plain and obvious." And Stephen said, You don't know that. You can't be sure of it. That's too much conjecture. Like, you don't have to— you don't know this definitively. And I'm like, come on, like, we know this. This is why this is happening. He's like, you just don't know it. I'm like— so we got into a little back and forth in reference to that. And he's like, okay, how about I just call John and I'll ask him? John Koval, the Doge guy working with DHS. I'm like, "Okay." He's like, "I'm gonna call John. You guys be quiet." So you guys were me and his technical assistant. "And I'll just have a quick conversation with John in reference to this $2.7 million and why." Mm-hmm. So he pulls out his cell phone and he calls John.

He puts John on speakerphone and he says, "John, can you tell me why?" We're going through all this effort with these 2.7 million people. And John said, matter-of-fact terms back, he's like, well, there's two outcomes that we're hoping for here. One, we'll make the people's lives so miserable with the, you know, their lives will just be sort of, you know, hard to go through because we'll turn off their credit, we'll turn off their credit card, we'll turn off their bank. They'll just want to self-deport, or two, they'll go into a Social Security office and we'll have ICE pick them up there, or we'll go— you'll refer them over to us and ICE will pick them up either at USCIS or at ICE, wherever you just, you determine that they should go. Just matter-of-factly. And, and, um, you know, When he said that, I was, I was shocked that he said it so matter-of-factly. I was, I was pretty shocked that that happened. It's one thing to think, you know, and be like 98% sure, but you don't really know something. It's different when you know it 100% and you just heard it from, you know, a chief official over at DHS who also happens to be a Doge associate.

And he made it very plainly clear that this is what he was trying to do and what the outcomes they were seeking. Stephen was like, thank you for the information. Quickly got off the call. My office, I had to go through a different door than Stephen did out the conference room. He quickly got up. We didn't talk about it. We didn't have an after the meeting conversation about it. That was also a little bit shocking because I'm sure my face said, "I told you so," in unequivocal terms. But I was, you know, you know. And so he got up, he went to his office. I got up, went to mine, and then we never talked about it again.

Jeremiah quit the SSA a few months later, and now he's filing a whistleblower complaint. The 2.7 million person list was a crisis averted. The SSA didn't add those names to the Death Master File. As far as Jeremiah can tell, they are still alive. But of course, they always were. The government is filled with things like the Death Master File, built for one purpose: but if you're of a certain disposition, usable for something else. A list of the dead, a public service to track who is alive and who is dead, or a tool to kill off anyone you don't like. It's not legal. It flies in the face of rules and laws that have governed the list for decades. It violates the whole name of the list, but that doesn't mean you can't do it anyway.

Nadia Rehman is a producer on our show. By the way, we did reach out to all the people and agencies Jeremiah names in this story. Only the Department of Homeland Security got back to us. They gave us a statement saying, quote, "The government is finally doing what it should have all along: sharing information across the federal government." to solve problems. Two congressional offices are currently looking into the allegations Jeremiah made in his whistleblower claim. Coming up, one man will suffer through many ordeals to have a private encounter with the God living here on Earth, specifically in Barcelona. That's In a Minute from Chicago Public Radio. When our program continues. It's This American Life. I'm Ike Srisakundarajah. Today's show, "Not Today, Hades." Our last act, Act 3, Zeus. He has taken many forms here on Earth. For the last 20 years, millions have been worshiping a man they say performs miracles. They call him many names. Magician, Messiah, the Chosen One. And he looks in some ways kind of anonymous, like nobody special. He's short, 5'7". He's soft-spoken, shy even. The legends about this man are many, but very few of his devotees have ever actually met him, let alone talked with him.

Writer Daniel Alarcón is one of them. One of the very few mere mortals to have met Lionel Messi, arguably the greatest soccer player of all time. Daniel talked about it on the podcast he hosts with his longtime friend, who's also a writer, John Green. Daniel adapted it for our show.

So, John. Yeah. Once upon a time, there were many, many magazines that were published in the United States and around the world. As you know, I've written for many of them. And magazines, for our younger listeners, are like very thin little books. It's like— Instagram but text-based and printed. Yes. And there was a specific niche among these that were called glossies. And glossies were kind of the high-end fashion magazines, and the glossies got their name from the glossy paper that they were printed on. Um, so Vanity Fair, GQ, Vogue, those are the glossies. And they were kind of lucrative. Yeah, they paid great. They paid so much money. Uh, I had never written for a glossy magazine, I should say, until one of these editors who worked at one of these magazines called me up and asked me if I was interested in writing a profile of Lionel Messi. And of course I was interested. Huge soccer fan, blah, blah, blah. The problem is that I was about to be married and the reporting trip would be the week after my, my wedding. So terrible timing. I was told I would get to spend 3 days with the world's greatest player.

I get to see a training session, I get to go to a game, I'd have full access. And I spoke with Carolina and she said, you gotta go, you gotta do this. And we would do the honeymoon later. And yeah. And I think, you know, you know this, but I think it's worth repeating just what a genius Lionel Messi is, spoken of in the same breath as Pelé, as Maradona. And I felt like there are people who watch Lionel Messi play a game and they're like, man, he's good. And there are people like me who understand it or feel like we understand it on a completely different level. And I thought that there would be a way that I could express to him that my understanding of what he was accomplishing on the pitch was not like, woohoo, goal, you know, it was a much more sophisticated understanding. And I was like, yeah, no doubt me and Leo are going to be friends. That's, that's totally realistic. I was imagining us like, you know, hanging out at his house, like playing Xbox or, you know, FIFA or something. And then like going to eat some like Argentine barbecue somewhere, the grill in Barcelona somewhere.

And then, you know, riding, riding in his car. And then at the end of the night, he'd be like, you know what, man, you're so cool. Cancel your flight back. Like we're hanging out. Yeah. Normal stuff. So this is what I was imagining. Right. And yeah, so basically 36 hours after my wedding, I'm on a plane to Barcelona. I arrived in New York, so I flew from San Francisco to New York. I checked my email and that's when I got the first blow, which was that I would no longer have 3 days with Lionel Messi. I would have a single day. Now, I still thought a single day is good, you know? You know, I was like, a day, that's still pretty good. I checked my email again when I got to Barcelona, and now it was no longer a day. It was an hour. Okay. So, um, at this point, just to be clear, I had given up my honeymoon to spend an hour with a soccer player. Yeah. It was just beginning to dawn on me that this was the wrong way to start my marriage. Right. So here's what happened. I got to Barcelona.

You know, I had planned 4 days in town. Now I've got 2 extra days to report. So I'm just going to report the shit out of this story, which is what I do. So I talked to everybody. I found the guy who took Messi's first photo. ID back when Messi was a teenager with, like, long hair, and he needed his ID card so he could enter the grounds of the stadium. I found the owners of the Argentine restaurant in the suburb where Messi has his gigantic home, and I got to sit in the booth where Messi sometimes goes to eat. So anyway, I finally do have my day where I'm going to go meet Lionel Messi, and I'm told to get to the Ciudad Deportiva around 10:00 AM. And of course, I did. Punctually there. And I get there and I'm like, hey, so I'm a journalist for this fancy glossy magazine. This has all been scheduled. Publicists, editors have been negotiating my arrival. Can I walk around? No, no, no, you can't. I'm like, okay. And they take me to this kind of press room and they tell me Messi will be there in a few minutes.

It's super hot. This is like September. I was not given so much as a glass of water. And I waited and I waited and I waited. And then someone came in and told me that I'd be meeting Messi, actually not then, but like before afternoon training. And I was like, okay, so can I watch the training? And they're like, no, absolutely not. You cannot watch the training. And I'm just like, fuck, what the hell? Like, I'm like, what is this? So kind of like, I kind of like am peeking out the window and I see Messi and the other players arrive. They have super fancy cars. And naturally Messi did not come up to speak to me before training. And a little factotum was sent up to tell me that he would come after training. So at this point, training started at like 3:00. I've been there, remember, since 10:00. I've resorted to going to the bathroom and just like lapping water into my mouth out of the sink because I have not been given anything. That's nothing. I'm eating, like, wadded up paper towels, just chewing on paper just to trick myself like I'm starving.

And then I didn't know what had happened at training that day. I found out later, but I could tell because I am an astute judge of character, Jon, as you know, that something bad had happened at training. I kind of saw the players trudging off with this look of, there but for the grace of God go I. This kind of like, They had seen something. I found out later that the something they had seen was a young player named Ibrahim Afellay had torn his ACL. Mm. And, um, so I had, of course, was not allowed to watch training, so I didn't see any of this, but I could sense something was wrong. And that is one of those things that I think really affects players' moods because they know that all of them are one bad turn, one injury like that away from sitting out for a year, you know? Yeah. And maybe in, like, in the case we bring in, maybe never quite being the same. Never quite being the same. Exactly. Which is precisely what happened to Falei. Yeah. Anyway, at this point it's past 6 PM, so I've been there for a full working day.

Nothing to eat. Super hot. And I'm not one to be dramatic, Jon, but, I was basically being held prisoner at the Barcelona training ground by that point. That's how it felt. So finally, it's, it's just before 7 PM when the world's greatest player finally walks in. We sit down at this table. It's this little silver table. There's 3 chairs. It's me across from Messi. And his publicist is kind of in the middle. And so begins the world's worst interview. It's like, he batted me away. Like, I, I, I can't remember what I asked him, but it, I, you know, he's like, he gave me this look like he'd rather be at the dentist. I mean, and just looking at me and I'm like disheveled and sweaty. My shirt was a normal size at the beginning of the day, but after like, you know, 8 hours of being held hostage at the Barnes Sloan training ground in like a hot September day, the shirt was just stuck to me. Um, And I asked him my first question, and he said this thing, and I'm going to imitate an Argentine accent. He said, "Che, pero me han preguntado eso tantas veces," which is basically like, dude, I've been asked this so many times.

He's rolling his eyes. Oh, God. And it got worse from there. It just got worse. I realized that something bad has happened at training. I realized that like he's not interested in speaking with me. He doesn't know what a GQ is or what a Vogue is. He doesn't give a shit. He doesn't care. He's just like, this weird guy who's all sweaty is sitting here, you know, he's like been waiting for me for 8 hours like a freaking stalker. And now he's asking me dumb questions that I've been asked before. And, you know, so he's just being monosyllabic. And at the end of it, it's just like, it's just devastating. You know, he basically, the publicist just kind of calls time on it and it's done. Before he walks out, we take this photograph. I asked the publicist, "Is it okay if we take a photograph?" And he said this thing to me. He was like, "Of course. I know we all have feelings." We all have feelings? The publicist can sense my humiliation, which is actually manifesting as physical pain. Like, at this point, it's just like, this is the worst reporting experience of my life, possibly one of the most humiliating experiences of my life.

At all, you know, the whole of it. So I, I took my photo. Messi walks out immediately, of course, forgets the entire interaction that I have never forgotten. Um, yep. Needless to say, I wrote my draft, uh, and then got a very efficient, carefully worded email from my editor saying that the article was not going to be published and that I could kindly take my kílfi and go away. Brutal. Yeah. I don't know how to ask this delicately, but like, even on his best day, Lionel Messi is pretty at arm's length when it comes to interviews. And in retrospect, there is something charming about the fact that you thought you were going to get the real Lionel Messi. Yeah. I mean, you know, he batted me aside like I was, you know, a third-tier defender and, and went on with his life. And so here I am thinking, man, we're gonna vibe on this because we are both, you know, have this like deep emotional and deep intellectual understanding of the game. And what basically what he was telling me was like, no, you're down here and I'm up here.

And John's show is called The Away End, which is a soccer podcast about the run-up to the World Cup made by two people who really like books. Emmanuel Jochi produced this version for our show.

Call it to his face. If you were faced with him in all his glory, what would you ask if you had just one question?

And yeah, yeah, God is great. Yeah, yeah, God is great. Our program was produced today by me and edited by David Gastonbaum. The people who put together today's show are: Thea Bennen, Dana Chivas, Cassie Howley, Adrian Lilly, Seth Lind, Molly Marcello, Kathryn Raimondo, Stowe Nelson, Robyn Reed, Ryan Rumery, Alyssa Shipp, Christopher Swatalla, Nancy Updike, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor is Sara Abdurahman, and our executive editor is Emmanuel Barry. Special thanks today to Sam McKinnis. Thanks also to all our This American Life partners. When you join, you'll get regular exclusive bonus episodes, listen ad-free, and most importantly, help us continue making this show, join at thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always to our boss, Ira Glass. You know, at his own wedding recently, he decided it would be funny to start his vows by saying, "It's this American wife." Nobody laughed.

It was just beginning to dawn on me that this was the wrong way to start my marriage.

I'm Ike Shreeskunderarajah. Ira Glass will be back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Be in love.