Naomia Davis hasn’t been able to talk on the phone since 2004. The 80-year-old Brooklynite was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s more than 10 years ago and can no longer read.

Despite all of this, the government still expects her to pay back a federal student loan she took out in the 1980s to attend cosmetology school. And so every month, $134 of the $894 Davis gets in Social Security—her only income, except for Medicaid—is garnished by the government and put toward paying back her debt.

“How can you take money from someone who is not in her right mind?” asked Monica Arroyo-Horne, Davis’s 55-year-old daughter, who now legally controls her mother’s finances. “It’s horrible, I feel bad for her. I sit here and often wonder what if I wasn’t here in her life.”

After sending letters to government agencies and local council members in an effort to stop the government from garnishing her mother’s benefits, Arroyo-Horne turned to lawyers at the Brooklyn Office of the Aging, a division of New York City’s Legal Aid Society to try and get the Department of Education to forgive the loan. The application has been pending since late last year and they’re still waiting to hear back.

Davis’s story isn’t unique. In 2013, the government garnished about $150 million in Social Security benefits from Americans to pay back their student loans, according to a September analysis from the Government Accountability Office. Between 2002 and 2013, the number of senior citizens losing out on a portion of their Social Security to pay back education debt soared 500% from 6,000 to 36,000.

That number is only expected to grow as generations of Americans who were more likely to take on loans for their own schooling or to pay for their kids’ education retire. More than 3 million Americans ages 50 to 64 are in default on their student loans, putting them at risk of having their benefits garnished when they claim Social Security, if they don’t find a way to become current on their debt. When students take on loans through the federal government instead of through private lenders they have access to protections such as the ability to pay according to their income or defer payment on their loans if they become unemployed. But the federal government also has powers, not available to private lenders, to collect on those loans if borrowers default instead of finding a way to pay them back, such as garnishing portions of borrowers’ tax refunds and Social Security checks.

“The number of Americans in or near retirement with student loan debt is increasing dramatically,” Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat from Missouri who requested more information from the GAO on seniors experiencing garnishment earlier this year, wrote in a statement to MarketWatch. “This means the number of Americans having their Social Security garnished to recoup student loans could also rise, potentially cutting a dangerous hole in the safety net of hundreds of thousands of retired Americans—many of whom depend on Social Security to keep them out of poverty.”

When a borrower is delinquent on her student loan for at least 425 days, the Department of Education has the authority to initiate the process of administrative offset. Through this mechanism, the Treasury Department withholds portions of a borrower’s tax refund or Social Security benefits and puts it toward paying off the loan. There are reasons borrowers in default may be exempt from administrative offset, like if their debt falls below a given threshold or if their monthly Social Security check is relatively small.

Much of the public discussion of the student loan crisis has focused on how the debt is weighing on today’s young people, but Davis’s story and others illustrate how education debt is affecting Americans of all ages. It also raises the question of how far the federal government should go to collect often decades-old debt from people who are living on a fixed income and may no longer be able to earn the money to pay it off, particularly as the number of seniors in this predicament is poised to rise.

“It’s almost predatory that they are put in these situations,” said Adam Minsky, a Boston-based attorney who specializes in student-loan issues.

There are ways borrowers can take action before they lose a portion of their government benefits. Government programs allow defaulted borrowers an avenue to become current on their loans and then continue to make manageable payments based on their income. Denise Horn, a Department of Education spokeswoman, noted in a statement that the agency worked with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to develop the Student Loan Debt Collection Assistant, which helps borrowers research their options for getting out of default. In recent years, the Department also expanded options for borrowers to make more manageable payments based on their income.

The Department also offers borrowers access to its ombudsman group, which can help them with loan disputes. Ombudsman staffers research a borrower’s application and work with them as well as servicers, collection agencies and other institutions with their fingers on the loan to identify manageable repayment options, explain interest and collection charges, clarify discrepancies and other services.

“We know that the rising cost of higher education and growing levels of student debt hit home for millions of Americans,” Horn wrote.

In many cases, borrowers aren’t aware of these options, said Shanna Tallarico, a senior staff attorney at pro-bono law firm New York Legal Assistance Group, who works with student loan borrowers. “People just feel hopeless, all they know is that they owe X amount of dollars each month and they don’t have that.”

Patricia Brooks defaulted on her federal student loan about 10 years ago after struggling to make payments on the debt, which she says was somewhere between $35,000 and $45,000. “I just got frustrated with them and didn’t do anything about it for a while,” the 65-year-old recalled in a recent interview. Meanwhile, with interest and fees, the debt ballooned to $185,000. Then when she turned 62 and started claiming Social Security, Brooks said she noticed she was losing out on about $150 worth of benefits to pay back her loan.

She says she contacted the Department of the Treasury who referred her to the Department of Education who referred her to a collection agency. Brooks is exploring a deal with that company that could allow her to make monthly payments instead of losing her benefits. But she’s wary of trusting their offer without more information. Brooks said she may just decide to stick with an unpleasant arrangement that she knows -- losing the $150 in benefits per month -- instead of taking the risk that the new payment plan is worse.

“It’s a sad thing to be an American citizen and think ‘can I trust my own government?’ and that’s how I feel.”

Brooks is still active, but it’s not uncommon for seniors who might not be at their intellectual peak to become confused or vulnerable. Multiple lawyers who represent elderly clients or student loan borrowers told MarketWatch that it’s typical for borrowers to be puzzled about why their benefits are being taken away.

Borrowers receive warnings before their benefits are offset, but because those warnings can include complicated jargon, “I would guess that most seniors in this position don’t understand the paperwork related to this issue,” said Aurore DeCarlo, the attorney in charge at Brooklyn’s Office for the Aging.

In some cases, it’s been decades since the borrowers took out the loans and they may not have ever completed schooling or worked in their intended field. In that case, seniors may have forgotten about the debt by the time their benefits are garnished, DeCarlo said.

Ruby Nicholson says she’s still dealing with the ramifications of a federal student loan she unwittingly signed up for decades ago. Nicholson says she was approached on the street by a man in the mid-1980s who said he would enroll her in a free program to earn her GED. She signed up, looking forward to the idea of finally completing a goal she had wanted to achieve for years. “I could get a better job and do right for me and my daughter,” the 78-year-old recalled in a recent interview. It turns out the man may have actually signed Nicholson up for a loan, but she says it was without her knowledge.

Nicholson started attending classes in September of that year, and when she returned from Christmas break there was a padlock on the door of the school.

“After it went out of business I didn’t think nothing about it,” said Nicholson, who lives in Brooklyn. Until decades later, when she noticed she was losing about $285 a month from her Social Security checks, her only source of income, to pay for a student loan she apparently took out to attend the school. She’s managed to stave off garnishment for the last 11 to 12 months by sending a $225 monthly check to a law firm as part of an informal settlement to a lawsuit filed against her by the government in the 1990s to collect on the loan.

“The more I’m thinking about that, the more I’m getting tears in my eyes, because it just hurt me so bad,” she said. Nicholson never finished the GED program and continued to earn a living as a domestic worker, but she still owes about $9,000 for the loan. “I’m paying for something I didn’t get.”

Once seniors begin seeing their benefit checks disappear, it’s possible, though challenging, to reverse the process. Seniors can rid themselves completely of their loans through what’s called a total and permanent disability discharge, a mechanism that allows borrowers to stop paying back their loans if they’re medically unable to work.

Davis’s attorney is working to have her loans forgiven that way. Seniors can also apply for an exemption on the basis the loan is causing an undue hardship, like if they can’t meet their medical expenses, for example, which can be difficult to prove.

Short of complete loan forgiveness, seniors can sometimes rehabilitate or consolidate their loans out of default and enter into repayment programs that are based on a borrower’s income and financial circumstances. In many cases, that can result in monthly payments that are less than the Social Security offset, according to Minsky, the student loan lawyer.

Policy makers are also exploring ways to maintain a safety net for seniors with defaulted student loans, while still ensuring the Education Department gets the money it’s owed. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and McCaskill, Democrats from Massachusetts and Missouri, respectively, sent a letter to the GAO earlier this year asking for more information about the financial and loan status of seniors losing their benefits.

The two haven’t committed to any policy prescriptions just yet, but some possible fixes include raising the minimum amount of Social Security benefits seniors can keep. Right now, the government can’t garnish more than 15% of a senior’s benefits or any amount that cuts their checks below $750 a month, a floor the government set in 1998 and hasn’t updated since to keep up with inflation.

“That’s one thing that’s pretty alarming,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “Congress hasn’t really changed the rule and in doing so has put seniors in a dangerous or precarious situation.”