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The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and Border Patrol, is using a broad web of surveillance tools — purchased as its budget has ballooned under this administration — to monitor, apprehend and intimidate both the people it seeks to deport and the U.S. citizens critical of its policies, in the real world and online.
While other law enforcement agencies have access to surveillance tech, ICE has become a leader in these tactics, according to lawyers and privacy advocates.
Surveillance of observers
In Minnesota, the ACLU is suing the administration for violating the First Amendment rights of protesters and observers like Emily. In the lawsuit, more than 30 people gave statements under oath describing similar encounters with immigration agents.
In the lawsuit, attorneys for the government denied that the conduct of federal agents has violated the Constitution.
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At a congressional hearing last month, acting Director for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Todd Lyons denied there is a database of protesters.
But federal immigration agents are using a facial recognition app called Mobile Fortify and U.S. Customs and Border Protection recently signed a contract with Clearview AI, a facial recognition company that has accessed billions of images of peoples’ faces off the internet.
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In a statement to NPR, DHS stressed that Mobile Fortify, which was developed under the Trump administration, “does not access open-source material, scrape social media, or rely on publicly available data.”
In cases where federal agents know observers’ names and addresses, privacy advocates say federal agents may be running license plates to access Department of Motor Vehicle data to find out who the car is registered to and their home address.
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One way ICE can access state DMV data is through Nlets, a nonprofit that facilitates data sharing between law enforcement agencies. Late last year, a group of Democratic lawmakers called on Democratic governors to cut off ICE’s access to their DMV data in Nlets “in response to Donald Trump politicizing and weaponizing the agency.”
Minnesota is one of a handful of states that have taken that step, but “there are so many different ways that DHS can obtain this data,” said Emily Tucker, executive director at the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law. “If states cut off their access through Nlets, they can go to data brokers like Thomson Reuters or Lexis Nexis.”
Last May, ICE spent $5 million on a subscription with Thomson Reuters, which sells data to both the public and private sector, to provide what ICE describes as “license plate reader data to enhance investigations for potential arrest, seizure and forfeiture.”
Over the last year, the Trump administration has undertaken an unprecedented project of aggregating Americans’ personal data and making more of it accessible to ICE. A data sharing agreement with Health and Human Services gives ICE the names, dates of birth and home addresses of immigrants without legal status who are included in Medicaid data. ICE also brokered an agreement with the Internal Revenue Service, but last week a federal judge found the IRS had violated federal tax law when it disclosed address information to ICE for more than 42,000 individuals.
That builds on a staggering data collection effort by ICE that ramped up during Trump’s first term. As of 2022, ICE could locate three out of four American adults through their utility records, and the agency had scanned one in three Americans’ driver’s license photos, a study by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology found at the time.
In addition, the use of automatic license plate readers has exploded around the country in recent years, which allows law enforcement to tap into a vast network of cameras to search the movements of specific cars. DHS personnel have direct access to some of these networks, and have been able to use relationships with local law enforcement to access others.
ICE also has tools that can track locations from cell phone data. On Tuesday, a group of more than 70 Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to the DHS Office of Inspector General requesting an investigation into the agency’s use of such technology without obtaining a warrant.
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ICE started using the ELITE app in June, according to a DHS document detailing its technology that uses AI.
The app draws from DHS information systems as well as new data ICE has received from other agencies, like home addresses from Medicaid records. A Palantir blog post describes this as “limited data shared by other agencies under a data sharing agreement permitting it to be used for immigration enforcement purposes.”
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DHS’s web of surveillance also extends to social media. NPR spoke to two people with hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram who said they had their Global Entry status revoked after making posts critical of ICE. The link between those events and their posts is unclear.
What’s more clear is the administration’s use of administrative subpoenas, sent to tech companies like Google or Meta, demanding personal information to unmask anonymous accounts. Such subpoenas — which can be issued by federal agencies without a judge or a grand jury — have typically been used with tech companies in cases involving serious offenses like child sexual abuse material. Now, privacy and civil rights experts say they’re being used to threaten free speech.
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DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has repeatedly warned that sharing officer information will be treated as a criminal act. Generally, the act of doxing is considered revealing personal information beyond a person’s name, like a home address, phone number or Social Security Number.
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The post ICE Has Spun a Massive Surveillance Web. We Talked to People Caught in It appeared first on American Renaissance.
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