American Dragnet

I. Executive Summary

When you think about government surveillance in the United States, you 
likely think of the National Security Agency or the FBI. You might 
even think of a powerful police agency, such as the New York Police 
Department. But unless you or someone you love has been targeted for 
deportation, you probably don’t immediately think of Immigration and 
Customs Enforcement (ICE).

This report argues that you should. Our two-year investigation, 
including hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests and a 
comprehensive review of ICE’s contracting and procurement records, 
reveals that ICE now operates as a domestic surveillance agency. Since 
its founding in 2003, ICE has not only been building its own capacity 
to use surveillance to carry out deportations but has also played a 
key role in the federal government’s larger push to amass as much 
information as possible about all of our lives. By reaching into the 
digital records of state and local governments and buying databases 
with billions of data points from private companies, ICE has created a 
surveillance infrastructure that enables it to pull detailed dossiers 
on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time. In its efforts to arrest and 
deport, ICE has – without any judicial, legislative or public 
oversight – reached into datasets containing personal information 
about the vast majority of people living in the U.S., whose records 
can end up in the hands of immigration enforcement simply because they 
apply for driver’s licenses; drive on the roads; or sign up with their 
local utilities to get access to heat, water and electricity.

ICE has built its dragnet surveillance system by crossing legal and 
ethical lines, leveraging the trust that people place in state 
agencies and essential service providers, and exploiting the 
vulnerability of people who volunteer their information to reunite 
with their families. Despite the incredible scope and evident civil 
rights implications of ICE’s surveillance practices, the agency has 
managed to shroud those practices in near-total secrecy, evading 
enforcement of even the handful of laws and policies that could be 
invoked to impose limitations. Federal and state lawmakers, for the 
most part, have yet to confront this reality.

This report synthesizes what is already known about ICE surveillance 
with new information from thousands of previously unseen and 
unanalyzed records, illustrating the on-the-ground impact of ICE 
surveillance through three case studies – ICE access to driver data, 
utility customer data and data collected about the families of 
unaccompanied children. The report builds on, and would not have been 
possible without, the powerful research, organizing and advocacy of 
immigrant rights organizations like CASA, the Immigrant Defense 
Project, Just Futures Law, Mijente, the National Immigration Law 
Center (NILC), Project South and the American Civil Liberties Union 
(ACLU) of Northern California (among many others), which have been 
leading the effort to expose and dissever ICE’s American dragnet.

A. Key Findings

    ICE surveillance is broader than people realize. It is a dragnet.

Most Americans probably do not imagine that their information is 
captured by ICE’s surveillance networks. In fact, ICE has used face 
recognition technology to search through the driver’s license 
photographs of around 1 in 3 (32%) of all adults in the U.S. The 
agency has access to the driver’s license data of 3 in 4 (74%) adults 
and tracks the movements of cars in cities home to nearly 3 in 4 (70%) 
adults. When 3 in 4 (74%) adults in the U.S. connected the gas, 
electricity, phone or internet in a new home, ICE was able to 
automatically learn their new address. Almost all of that has been 
done warrantlessly and in secret.

    ICE built its surveillance dragnet by tapping data from private 
companies and state and local bureaucracies.

For most of its history, immigration enforcement in the United States 
was a small data affair, relying primarily on ad hoc tips and 
information sharing agreements with state and local law enforcement 
agencies. After 9/11, ICE paired those programs with much broader 
initiatives, tapping vast databases held by private data brokers as 
well as state and local bureaucracies historically uninvolved with law 
enforcement. Through those initiatives, ICE now uses information 
streams that are far more expansive and updated far more frequently, 
including Department of Motor Vehicle (DMV) records and utility 
customer information, as well as call records, child welfare records, 
credit headers, employment records, geolocation information, health 
care records, housing records and social media posts. Access to those 
new data sets, combined with the power of algorithmic tools for 
sorting, matching, searching and analysis has dramatically expanded 
the scope and regularity of ICE surveillance.
ICE has scanned the driver’s license photos of 1 in 3 adults.

ICE has access to the driver’s license data of 3 in 4 adults.

ICE tracks the movements of drivers in cities home to 3 in 4 adults.

ICE could locate 3 in 4 adults through their utility records.

    ICE has invested heavily in surveillance and has acquired advanced 
surveillance technology far earlier than people realize.

A review of over 100,000 spending transactions by ICE reveals that the 
agency spent approximately $2.8 billion between 2008 and 2021 on new 
surveillance, data collection and data-sharing initiatives. Those 
transactions also reveal that ICE was building up advanced 
surveillance capacities roughly half a decade earlier than previously 
known. Until now, the earliest records obtained by the Center on 
Privacy & Technology suggested that ICE began requesting and using 
face recognition searches on state and local data sets in 2013. 
However, our research uncovered a contract from 2008 between ICE and 
the biometrics contractor L-1 Identity Solutions. The contract enabled 
ICE to access the Rhode Island motor vehicle department’s face 
recognition database to “recognize criminal aliens.” That places the 
first known ICE face recognition searches during the waning days of 
the George W. Bush administration.

    ICE exploits people’s vulnerability and trust in institutions to 
get its hands on more data.

To locate its targets, ICE takes data that people give to state and 
local agencies and institutions in exchange for essential services. 
ICE often accesses that data without the permission or even awareness 
of the entity that originally collected the information. ICE has also 
taken advantage of the vulnerability of unaccompanied children seeking 
to reunite with their families.

    ICE leverages people’s trust in state DMVs to target deportations.

Across the country, 16 states and Washington, D.C. have allowed 
undocumented people to apply for driver’s licenses, provided that they 
volunteer a range of personal information including their legal names, 
dates of birth and addresses. Hundreds of thousands of undocumented 
people have trusted state DMVs with that information to apply for 
driver’s privileges. However, in at least five of those 17 
jurisdictions, ICE can warrantlessly search through state driver 
records for the purpose of civil immigration enforcement. In at least 
six of those 17 jurisdictions, ICE has used face recognition to scan 
drivers’ license photographs to carry out deportations. When 
undocumented drivers apply for licenses, they place a significant 
amount of trust in the state that their information will not be used 
against them. Allowing ICE to use driver records for immigration 
enforcement purposes is a profound betrayal of that trust.

    ICE leverages people’s need for water, gas, electricity, phone and 
internet to target deportations.

In addition to pulling DMV data, ICE also buys and searches customer 
records from utility companies to locate people for deportation. The 
agency has been able to access information from utility records by 
contracting with Thomson Reuters, a private data broker. While 
undocumented people may avoid sharing their information with entities 
like DMVs, it creates extreme hardship when people cannot connect 
their homes with water, gas, electricity, phone and internet. “For 
people who are not easily traceable via traditional sources,” a 
Thomson Reuters marketing letter reads, “locator information from 
utility hookup records may provide the only current and accurate 
address and phone number data available.” By contracting with private 
data brokers, ICE has been able to access utility record information 
belonging to over 218 million utility customers across all 50 states 
and the district.

    ICE used interviews with unaccompanied children to find and arrest 
their family members.

In the last two decades, the number of unaccompanied children fleeing 
violence and poverty by crossing the U.S. border has risen by an order 
of magnitude. When children arrive at the border, they are suffering 
physical and emotional trauma. Congress has tried to protect those 
children by enacting bipartisan legislation to transfer the 
responsibility for their care away from law enforcement and to the 
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). To find proper 
placements for the children, HHS interviews them about any potential 
family members in the U.S. who could care for them. But in perhaps the 
starkest example of ICE exploiting the trust of vulnerable people, the 
agency entered into an information-sharing agreement with HHS to use 
the information these children and their family members shared to find 
and arrest at least 400 of those family members. While Congress later 
used an appropriations rider to partly end the program and U.S. 
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has 
since formally rescinded it, this arrangement illustrates the lengths 
that ICE has been willing to go to find information on potential 
targets.
ICE exploits people's trust and vulnerability to get its hands on more 
data.

    ICE surveillance has evaded congressional oversight.

Most congressional leaders did not learn about ICE face recognition 
scans of DMV photos until The Washington Post ran an exposé on the 
practice, reporting on records obtained by the Center on Privacy & 
Technology. This exposé ran in 2019, over a decade after ICE penned 
its first known face recognition contract in 2008 for access to the 
Rhode Island driver database. The fact that ICE was conducting face 
recognition scans on driver’s license photos came as a shock to senior 
lawmakers – even those with the greatest insight into DHS activities. 
On learning of the face scans, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, the longtime chair of 
the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship, 
denounced the practice as “a massive, unwarranted intrusion into the 
privacy rights of Americans by the federal government, done secretly 
and without authorization by law.” ICE’s surveillance initiatives have 
regularly flown under Congress’ radar. While a few political leaders 
have pressed ICE in oversight letters and used appropriations riders 
to end the most aggressive of ICE’s actions, to date there has not 
been one full congressional hearing or Government Accountability 
Office (GAO) report focused on ICE surveillance.

    State authorities are largely unaware of ICE’s surveillance of 
residents.

State lawmakers are almost always entirely unaware of ICE surveillance 
in their states and typically learn about the agency’s actions from 
the news. When Rep. Angela Romero of Utah learned that ICE and the FBI 
had searched through driver’s records in her state, she responded as 
many lawmakers do when information about ICE surveillance comes to 
light: “[T]his has never been shared with us before and the 
Legislature hasn’t approved it.” The lack of awareness from political 
leaders is compounded by state agencies’ failure to control or track 
ICE access to residents’ data. In Maryland, for example, when 
lawmakers asked two state agencies – the Maryland State Police and the 
Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration – for information about ICE 
searches of Maryland driver’s license data, the agencies each 
disclaimed responsibility and referred to the other as the ultimate 
custodians of information about ICE’s access.

    ICE has evaded state laws and lawmakers’ efforts to rein in its 
surveillance capabilities.

When state officials enact laws and policies to cut off their states’ 
data sharing with ICE, ICE regularly evades those restrictions – often 
by using alternative points of access within the complex web of 
systems connecting state and federal databases. In Washington, 
Governor Jay Inslee enacted a statewide policy to limit state agency 
cooperation with ICE only to discover that state licensing officials 
were routinely violating that policy. When state officials cut off 
ICE’s access to a state-run driver database, previously unseen records 
show that DHS searches of a separate network of driver data – one not 
operated by the state – nearly doubled. In Oregon, soon after 
lawmakers passed a law cutting off state data disclosures to ICE, the 
Oregon DMV signed agreements to sell its driver’s license records to 
Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis Risk Solutions, the two primary data 
brokers that sell ICE access to driver information.

    ICE surveillance deters people from accessing essential services.

Historically, the “chilling effects” of government surveillance refer 
to the way in which surveillance deters individuals from engaging in 
activities that the First Amendment protects, such as freedom of 
speech and assembly. But a growing body of research suggests that fear 
of ICE surveillance also deters immigrants and their families from 
participating in a broad range of activities necessary for health and 
well-being not only of individuals, but of the communities of which 
they are part. Concern about ICE surveillance often leads individuals 
to avoid placing their information in government systems, even if 
those systems are unrelated to law enforcement. That fear inhibits 
people from enrolling in services critical for their own health and 
the health of their children. It also deters people from engaging with 
the legal system, such as by reporting crimes or testifying in court.

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