“To protect our benefits, we’ve already kicked nearly 275,000 illegal aliens off of the Social Security system,” President Donald Trump announced at a White House event Thursday, discussing efforts to stop payments to unqualified recipients.

“These were people – many of them have already left the country – and yet, we were sending them checks all the time,” Trump said. Earlier in the day, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem reported that 1.6 million illegal aliens have left the U.S. in the past 200 days.

“And we’re carrying out historic deportations to remove many more illegals committing Social Security fraud – the Social Security fraud that was taking place at levels nobody’s ever seen [before],” Trump said.

“And, what that’s doing is making the system strong. It’s making it strong. Biden never kicked anybody off; everybody joined,” the president explained.

Trump noted that Social Security has also removed from its rolls nearly 12.4 million names of people who, if alive today, would be over 120 years of age. Among them, 135,000 names, some of whom were being sent payments, were of people over 160 years old.