ICE Is Tracking Your Every Move

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has become known for both mass deportations and unmarked-van snatchings of peaceful protesters. ICE also turns out to be operating a vast intelligence system that tracks the movements of hundreds of millions of Americans.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Canton, Mississippi, in July 2019. (National Archives and Records Administration / Picryl)


US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has long been a magnet for controversy over its cruel treatment of migrants. But there’s another, potentially more alarming reason to worry about it: ICE has slowly transformed into a vast domestic spying agency that could easily be turned on the American people, whether citizens, documented, or undocumented.

That’s the conclusion of a new report from the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology, which argues that through contracts and partnerships with private data brokers, utility companies, DMVs, and other government bureaucracies, ICE has quietly built a system that lets it peer into and track the personal lives of all Americans on a never-before-seen scale. Titled American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21 Century, the report paints a picture of an agency that’s crossed ethical lines, dodged legal restrictions, and radically expanded the scope of its activities with little to no public oversight or debate.

“ICE has created a surveillance infrastructure that enables it to pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time,” states the report.

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