More than 80 local law enforcement agencies have agreed to share data with Ice, according to the ACLU, which obtained internal agency records

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

More than 80 law enforcement agencies in the US have agreed to share with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) license plate information that supports its arrests and deportation efforts, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which obtained a trove of internal agency records.

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The documents acquired by the ACLU show that Ice obtained access to a database with license plate information collected in dozens of counties across the United States – data that helped the agency to track people’s locations in real time. Emails revealed that police have also informally given driver information to immigration officers requesting those details in communications that the ACLU said appeared to violate local laws and Ice’s own privacy rules.

The files, which the ACLU obtained through a records request, have raised fresh concerns about Ice’s monitoring of immigrants and the way local police aid the Trump administration’s deportation agenda.

“It’s a huge invasion of privacy,” Vasudha Talla, an ACLU staff attorney, told the Guardian. “Location surveillance and location data can really paint such an intimate portrait of someone’s life, down to what they do minute by minute.”

The records, reviewed by the Guardian, show:

To support its “enforcement and removal operations” and investigations, Ice secured a $6m contract with the Thomson Reuters Corporation to access a license plate reader database maintained by Vigilant Solutions, a private data analytics company, through September 2020.

As part of the contract proposal, the companies said they would provide Ice with commercially collected location information about drivers from the “most populous 50 metropolitan areas in the US”. Ice could also accept additional data collected by local and state law enforcement agencies already using Vigilant’s software.

Ice encouraged its agents to request access to the local law enforcement data, and Vigilant’s software could facilitate those requests.

The database offered an “extremely successful method and system of locating and apprehending targets”, Ice said in contract documents. If the agency did not have access to the information, “the arrest rate would decline by as much as 20%”.

The expansion of automated license plate recognition technology, which allows cameras to take images of plates and link them to specific locations, has sparked intense backlash from civil liberties groups in recent years.

Immigrant rights advocates say that Ice’s use of this data could enhance the agency’s ability to track and arrest undocumented immigrants throughout their neighborhoods.

One Vigilant document, labeled an “agency data sharing report”, listed roughly 80 agencies Ice was “receiving data” from. The list included a number of police agencies in California, which passed a “sanctuary state” law specifically aimed at restricting local police collaboration with Ice.

More than 9,000 Ice employees have access to the database, according to one email.

The documents show Ice allowed its agents working on civil immigration cases to search the database for files going back five years. That broad timeframe, Talla argued, risked dragging in associates of the individual being investigated or anyone who had a tie to a license plate over that period.

“It’s a form of mass surveillance technology that’s really ripe for abuse,” she said.

Training materials included in the records offered Ice officers a step-by-step guide on how to request this kind of data from other law enforcement agencies, and included a map of law enforcement departments that may be providing information to Vigilant’s database.

The ACLU also found that Ice had made informal requests to local police for surveillance help. Emails showed that a police detective in Orange county, California, repeatedly conducted database searches in response to requests from an Ice specialist in criminal investigations. The two appear to have worked together frequently over several years, with the Ice employee providing details of the immigration investigations (such as information from a target’s Facebook page) and the local detective responding with license plate information.

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“I am here for ya. :),” the detective wrote in one email to Ice, which included a report. In another exchange, after the Ice officer said “hate to ask” for more reports, the detective responded: “Come on, you don’t really hate to ask.. :).”

The ACLU said these exchanges suggested that Ice was not following its own “privacy guidance”, which dictates a more formal process of documenting and justifying Ice’s access to specific records.

A Thomson Reuters spokesperson declined to comment, and Vigilant did not respond to inquiries.

An Ice spokesperson, Matthew Bourke, defended the use of license plate information for investigations on Wednesday, saying the agency was not building its own database and that it would not use the data to track individuals with no connection to Ice enforcement.

Ice doesn’t take action against someone solely based on license plate data, he wrote in an email, adding that the agency limited database access to Ice employees who “need [license plate] data for their mission-related purposes”.

“Any ICE personnel who have accessed the system without authorization or who used the database in an inappropriate manner may be disciplined,” he added.

Vigilant has previously refused to comment on its relationship with Ice, and, in response to criticisms about its work with law enforcement, has said that agencies have ownership of their license plate data and choose whether to share it.

The ACLU has called on cities to reject contracts for license plate surveillance, to stop sharing this kind of data with Ice, and to pass proactive privacy ordinances that require oversight when police buy surveillance technology.