A new investigation reveals the immigration agency has collected data on most Americans.
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As
a teenager, I dismissed their concerns. “Listen, we’re not in the Middle East,”
I would counter.
My
parents knew better though. I soon received a rude awakening in the aftermath
of the September 11 attacks.
Almost
1,200 people, mostly Muslims, were rounded up and
detained after the attacks, often for months without charges. Arabs and South
Asians were racially profiled and
deported for minor immigration violations. The FBI began surveilling mosques
across America.
As
part of the homeland security reforms following 9/11, Congress created the U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in 2003 to ostensibly fight
terrorism and enforce immigration law. But the truth is, ICE went on to use its
newly established authority to spy on nearly everyone in the United States.
An
independent, two-year investigation has now revealed that ICE collected data
on hundreds of millions of Americans under a legally
— and ethically — questionable surveillance system largely outside of public
oversight.
Georgetown Law’s Center
on Privacy and Technology uncovered this dragnet after filing
over 200 Freedom of Information Act requests and reviewing ICE’s contracting
records from 2008 to 2021.
In
its report, released May 10,
the Center found that ICE has spied on most Americans without
a warrant and circumvented many state privacy laws, such as those in
California. The authors conclude: “ICE now operates as a domestic surveillance
agency.”
ICE has carried out this surveillance by turning to third parties like state Departments of Motor Vehicles, large utility companies, and private data brokers like LexisNexis Risk Solutions.
From
these sources, ICE gained access to driver’s license data for
3 in 4 adults living in the United States, and scanned a third of the license
photos with facial recognition technology.
ICE is also able to view over 218 million utility customers’ records across
the country, including for over half of California’s residents.
This
surveillance network has unsurprisingly hit immigrant communities hardest. The
agency has targeted immigrants for deportation by cruelly exploiting their
trust in public institutions, such as when undocumented people apply for
a driver’s license or
sign up for essential utilities like
water and electricity.
These
practices point to an agency that has clearly overstepped its boundaries. ICE
does not have the congressional authority to do this kind of bulk data
collection on the public. This overreach underscores the need to shift U.S.
immigration law away from the deportation-driven status quo.
Unfortunately,
this ICE program isn’t an isolated case. It’s part of a broader domestic
surveillance apparatus that spans decades and multiple federal agencies —
including the FBI, CIA, and
NSA — and ultimately impacts all of us.
During
the 1960s and ‘70s, federal agencies spied on
anti-Vietnam War protesters and civil rights leaders. More recently,
in 2013 whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency
created a massive surveillance program that secretly gathered
telephone records on millions of Americans, regardless of
whether they were suspected of any wrongdoing.
And
this February, newly declassified documents exposed
the CIA’s own secret bulk data
collection program to spy on Americans. The type of data
remains classified, but Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM)
have called for
greater transparency on the agency’s surveillance of Americans.
We
should all be alarmed by this growing domestic surveillance state. Left
unchecked, it corrodes public trust in our democratic institutions and
undermines our civil liberties, most notably the embattled right to privacy.
The
history of government surveillance demonstrates that we can never take this
right for granted.
Farrah Hassen,
J.D., is a writer, policy analyst, and adjunct professor in the Department of
Political Science at Cal Poly Pomona. This op-ed was distributed by
OtherWords.org.
