How is ICE tracking people in Minnesota? An expert explains
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Reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Twin Cities have spiked since Dec. 1, when the agency says it began an operation here. ICE has released only selective details of 19 arrests.
The operation is one of the latest to focus on a United States metro area as the Trump Administration pursues its goal of mass deportations. The federal agents trying to meet the government’s quotas have a growing set of tools to help them find people to arrest and deport.
In a statement to NPR, ICE said using technology in its work is nothing new.
For more, MPR News host Nina Moini talked with Stevie Glaberson, director of research and advocacy for the Center on Privacy and Technology, based at Georgetown Law. The think tank has spoken out about data ICE and its umbrella agency, the Department of Homeland Security, can access since before President Donald Trump’s second term.
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This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
A report your organization published in 2022 found ICE could find the addresses of three and four adults using utility records. What else did that research find?
We’ve been researching many of the Department of Homeland Security’s tactics for a long time and our research revealed that ICE has a variety of digital surveillance tools at its disposal to monitor the lives, not just of non-citizens, but of most people living in the U.S. ICE now has access to vast stores of state, local and particularly commercial data and this access is constantly expanding.
They not only can gather data from states and localities, but can buy data from data brokers, aggregators and miners, from companies. LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, Equifax, like the credit bureaus, Palantir and Clearview AI, are all companies that ICE either contracts with or has relationships with.
People may wonder, how can they have so much access to my personal data?
It’s a problem of of political will. I think there are government agencies and government entities are really intertwined with a lot of these companies. LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters, for example, are not only warehousing and providing access to so much data to ICE, but they’re also providing government lawyers with access to legal databases.
They’re the two premier companies providing lawyers with access to the legal tools they need to do their jobs.
Do you have a sense for how much of a role social media plays in all of this?
ICE is contracting with all these different companies and building tools to pull data stores from different sources together to be able to find out lots of information about someone. Once you have their name, or once you have one piece of information, you can build a dossier about huge aspects of their lives.
One of the areas that DHS is working in is looking at social media data. They have tools — Babel Street is one — that crawl the internet and look at publicly-available social media commentary. There’s a tool that sort of claims to rank the sentiments that people are putting forward on social media to try to identify who the agency is going to target for deportation. And that’s really scary from a First Amendment perspective.
Does DHS have access to information on citizens too?
It’s on us all to recognize this is not a problem that is exclusive to the Somali community in Minnesota. This is a problem that affects every single one of us and the ability to use this data to target folks for deportation is just one instance of the ways that our data trails can make us vulnerable. We are all in these data sets and the ways that we've seen this surveillance apparatus grow, it affects every single one of us.
Even in the immigration setting, it’s impacting both citizens and non-citizens alike. For example, we found that about 2,000 U.S. citizens appear in Customs and Border Patrol dataset of folks they've taken DNA from. DNA should not be taken from citizens under that program, but because there are no guardrails, it seems to be happening now.
In other senses, some of the same data stores that ICE is using to target people for deportation are available to other law enforcement entities as well. And in a sort of non-law-enforcement sense, the same data brokers, the same sales of data dossiers, are also being used to fuel things like algorithmic decision making about who should get apartments and what rent people should be asked to pay.
Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.
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