US uses private data to track immigrants

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0:37I'm a law citizen! Please help me! Videos of people being arrested by federal immigration agents. This is a fair way! The Trump administration says it's deported more than half a million people who entered the country unlawfully. It wants that number to grow dramatically. And just how government officials gather information on the people they want to deport is changing in a big way.

1:11This is Swamp Notes, the weekly podcast from the Financial Times, where we talk about all of the things happening in U.S. politics, finance and the economy. I'm Sonia Hudson. And this week we're asking, how is the U.S. government using private data to carry out immigration enforcement? Here with me to discuss is Peter Andringa. He's a reporter on the FT's visual investigations team. Hi, Peter. Hi, Sonia. And we've also got Stefania Palma, the FT's U.S. legal and enforcement correspondent. Hi, Stefania. Hi. So, Peter, you recently published a big investigation into how the Department of Homeland Security uses this web of private contractors, data brokers, and government agencies to help deport more people.

1:56What made you want to report this story? So some colleagues and I have been looking at federal contracts a lot this year, in part because ICE received a huge amount of money, over$75 billion, in the big, beautiful bill that the Trump administration passed over the summer. And so when ICE is trying to ramp up its operations so quickly, it turns to contractors to deploy that money into the field as fast as it can. So we've been looking at detention centers. We were looking at the deportation flights around the globe. And then later in the summer and early in the fall, I started seeing more and more videos of ICE operations on the ground and wondering, how does any of these get organized?

2:35You know, where does the data come from? How do they find out whether someone they've arrested is or isn't a citizen or is or isn't who they are? And so I started digging into the contracts, and I was surprised to learn that there really was this huge and growing web of contracted private companies involved in piecing this whole data system together. Stefania, before we delve any further into Peter's reporting, I think we should go over some definitions here. So ICE, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, sits under the Department of Homeland Security. What has DHS done historically and what's so different about this year?

3:13So DHS was set up right after the 9-11 terrorist attacks here in the U.S., sort of as a response and trying to put under a single umbrella different government efforts to counter that kind of risk. But obviously since then, the agency has been involved in a string of different things, be it immigration, drugs or human trafficking. And so by definition, given there's no one single mandate per se, You could argue there always has been a bit of tension as to what really defines this department in terms of responsibilities. And currently under the Trump administration, just because of how important the immigration policy has become for his second term, the DHS and ICE has therefore been heavily focused on immigration and deportations.

4:04Well, that leads us into, you know, this particular area that you reported on, Peter. Can you give us some examples of the companies that we're talking about here when we're talking about the use of private data for immigration enforcement? I mean, who is ICE buying from? So there's a whole range of companies, but like one that people will have probably heard of is a company called Palantir, which has been a vendor for ICE for a long, long time, who was often building tools that were helping with their criminal investigation. Palantir has been contracted to build a system that they're calling Immigration OS, that's trying to track the identity and path.

4:38They call it the immigration lifecycle of immigrants all throughout the country at all stages of their immigration process. And they're also using that then to manage tracking down who they're going to arrest and who they're going to deport and watching who leaves the country. So Palantir is basically this kind of data synthesis company. Like, they're bringing together all these sources of data to paint a really complete picture of how specific immigrants are moving through the country. That's exactly right. Palantir you can think of as the, like, connecting layer that pulls in data from a ton of different government systems.

5:13You know, ICE has been acquiring data from the IRS and from the Social Security Administration. They've been buying data from data brokers, from established companies as well. Like, Thompson Reuters, which is, you know, a big legal services data provider, has an investigative product called Clear that provides all sorts of utility bills, court records, internet data, vehicle registrations that ICE can use to find data both private and public on individuals all across the country. I don't think of Thompson Reuters as a company that would be working on this type of immigration enforcement. Palantir obviously, you know, I think in a lot of people's minds is really synonymous with this type of work.

5:51But it's interesting that immigration enforcement is also working with these really household names. Yeah, and to be clear, Palantir and Thompson Reuters didn't comment for our investigation. And I don't know how much the companies themselves are choosing whether or not their tools are being used for immigration. Palantir has obviously signed up to build this immigration OS system. But in Thomson Reuters' case, their tools are designed for criminal enforcement, and they sell tools to law enforcement, you know, local, state, federal, for all sorts of investigations. What kind of tools are we talking about here?

6:23One of the tools that has been really, really popularly used for criminal investigations for a long time are these automated license plate readers, which are networks of cameras across the country that ICE has bought through Thomson Reuters to be able to sort of tag different vehicles as they travel. You can look up one car that travels from place A to place B. You can look up the whole history for that car. You could look up any car that was past the specific camera at a specific time. And, you know, historically, that's really useful for tracing criminals across the country or the movement of drugs or weapons or whatever it may be.

6:54Now, we see examples where ICE is using this and linking it up with the registration data and with their citizenship data in order to make more arrests and ultimately sort of feed their deportation targets. Do we know how many companies ICE and DHS are purchasing data from? Like, how big is this web? There's definitely hundreds of different companies that ICE is buying stuff from. But the funny and surprising thing about it is that the dollar amounts involved are not always that large. ICE spends billions of dollars on deportations and on flights every year and on detention centers even more. But the total surveillance that we could find for the fiscal year 2025 was only about$350 million.

7:39And so, you know, in the big scheme of things, I think one of the interesting things we discovered is how inexpensive it is to acquire these surveillance tools. And that's in part because of the nature of the Internet. All of us have this trace data about our lives, about our social media activity, about products and services that we purchased. And that data is being sold and resold among data brokers on the Internet every single day. And so ICE and law enforcement more generally is able to tap into those data brokers for much, much less expensive than they might have otherwise sort of had to build surveillance capabilities on their own.

8:16Stefania, does any of this data collection and the way it's being used raise legal concerns? I think definitely. I think as it often has happened in recent decades when it comes to data collection and distribution linked to the Internet age, there always are legal questions. Hard to avoid. Yes, exactly. And I think in this case, there have been many questions around things like confidentiality and privacy. And we saw that in one case, for instance, sort of a nonprofit group and others filed a lawsuit arguing that the IRS was actually turning its back on its internal rules when it comes to protecting the confidentiality of information tied to taxpayers.

8:59And actually last month in that case, the judge decided to halt the agreement that IRS had with ICE, essentially arguing that it's very likely that this entire setup is in fact unlawful. So it definitely raises a lot of important questions and ones that also have important ties to the Constitution. There are constitutional protections about privacy from the government. How does that change when we're talking about privacy protections from private companies? I think critics of, say, what ICE is doing, especially with this use of data that is purchasing also from companies and not necessarily just from other parts of the government, definitely raises questions around the Fourth Amendment of the U.S.

9:45Constitution, which basically protects the population from on towards seizures or surveillance, essentially. And I think critics of ICE at the moment are arguing ICE purchasing this data from private companies is seen as an effort to kind of sidestep things like Fourth Amendment rights, but also other processes that would kick in, like having to go out and seek court orders in terms of trying to get access to this information. But having these deals is sort of seen as kind of a back channel to try and evade all of those responsibilities. And of course, this is going to be, I think, an enormous legal and constitutional question in this Trump administration.

10:30And Peter, you spoke to some former DHS staffers who face similar situations under prior administrations. What did they tell you? Yeah, I spoke with a lot of different officials from, you know, the last 20 years of work in the Department of Homeland Security. And they told me that, you know, there's been a real administration to administration shift over how they treat these issues of privacy and surveillance. The Biden administration in particular, they said, spent a lot of time carefully thinking about what types of data they could and couldn't purchase. And one official told me that they determined that a lot of stuff was legal that even then they thought was going to be inappropriate.

11:14And a big part of these discussions were actually two particular offices inside of DHS, the Privacy Office and the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. And these offices were constantly pushing and pulling against other parts of the department that were asking for more and more data and for more and more capabilities. And, you know, doing their best to negotiate those tradeoffs and to ensure transparency was happening where it needed to. The big change since this administration has come in, officials told me, is that these departments have really been sort of sidelined. The Department of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties went from over 130 staff to just 22.

11:50The privacy office has shrunk somewhat less in size, but has shrunk in ambitions. They've devolved a lot of authority to sort of local component offices. And what officials told me that means is that there's less and less oversight over how these technologies are being used. There's fewer and fewer people internally asking the hard questions about whether a given surveillance tool is really necessary or appropriate for a given use case. Okay, so all this investment in data, do we know what effect that is actually having on immigration enforcement? I think one big topic of debate in this second Trump administration is what specific policy priorities are doing to how law enforcement is rolled out in this country.

12:42And I would say a lot of Trump critics, but also sort of former law enforcement officials have continuously raised concerns around the fact that so many resources across the board are being taken away from other priorities, say even things like, for example, sort of the FBI. what happens when you move so much staff to focus on immigration crackdowns, when you have, say, an agency like the FBI that should be perhaps also, if not more, focused on preventing, say, terrorism attacks. And this is something that's concerned. This has really been growing, I think, in recent months. And there really doesn't seem to be any signal, essentially, that the administration is choosing to go the other way because immigration has become such a linchpin of this second presidency for Trump.

13:35And it's, I think, politically too important for him. Yeah, Stefania is absolutely right. I spoke with a lot of officials from the Homeland Security Investigations Division of ICE, which is from the old customs enforcement side that was focused on sort of human smuggling and drug smuggling and trafficking and all sorts of cross-border crimes. And some of those officials were fans of the president and actually agreed with his immigration goals. But the thing that they raised concerns to me about was the redirection of resources away from all of the other investigations they were working on. They told me they were really concerned that crimes against children or drug smuggling or weapons would be slipping into the country without someone like them watching.

14:16What does DHS and the White House have to say about all this? So we put these things both to DHS and the White House, and the White House pushed back against the idea that they're not able to do both. They argue that they can both enforce immigration law and enforce criminal law across the country. White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told me that narcotics seizures and human smuggling arrests are up significantly. And she described a historically secure border so that the Trump administration is making America safer than ever before. Stefania, what do you think comes next in this evolution of the Department of Homeland Security?

14:53I think it's interesting to see some of the data the DHS has put out. I think recently they came out and said that for the first year of Trump's second term, they expect to deport a total of approximately 600 ,000 people, which is actually definitely below the reportedly talked about one million mark. So it'll be interesting to see what that does politically. Do they keep doubling down and doubling down, especially as obviously midterm elections are coming up? And the question of immigration has obviously been a successful one for Trump during the general election of 2024 in a way that I think the Democratic Party has found far more testy as something to navigate.

15:40However, others argue that the kinds of, say, videos that Peter included in his story, the things that the public sees in terms of the level of aggression in terms of ICE arrests or just the unprecedented tools and legal tools used to divorce individuals may be shocking the population here in the U.S. in a new and different way. and in turn may be spurring some Democrats to actually stand up and forcefully sort of reject all of this. And Peter, what about you? What are you looking out for next? So the thing that I've been hearing from officials most recently and what their concerns really lay is in the expansion of these surveillance efforts beyond just immigration.

16:25President Trump raised a memo in September authorizing law enforcement across the federal government to investigate what they call, quote, acts of political violence and intimidation, including, quote, civil disorder. And officials inside DHS told me that those sorts of declarations, while they are not themselves laws, have the effect of shaping the behavior throughout this entire massive department. There are a lot of officials who I spoke to who are very afraid about what could happen next. Peter Endrega, he's a reporter on the FT's visual investigations team. Thanks, Peter. Thanks for having me.

17:00And Stefania Palma, our U.S. legal and enforcement correspondent, thanks so much. Thank you. All right, we are going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll do exit poll.

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17:55We are back with Exit Poll, where we ask an FT journalist one of your questions. This week, we have Steph Chavez, the FT's U.S. defense correspondent. Hi, Steph. Hi, Sonia. Nice to be here. Steph, we've heard from a bunch of listeners in the last couple weeks who had questions about the strikes that the U.S. military is launching on boats that they say are carrying drugs near the coast of Venezuela. One of them is Stephen from New Zealand, and he wanted to know this. What legal justification is the U.S. government using for these strikes? So, of course, the legality of the entire boat strikes campaign is being questioned.

18:33But in this case, in particular, it's the fact that they hit survivors. After viewing the video of the follow-up strike, which some lawmakers were able to see, Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said that it showed the U.S. military attacking shipwrecked sailors. So the DOD's own law of war manual says that shipwrecked people should not be knowingly attacked, fired upon, or unnecessarily interfered with, and that orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Saturday said that he was briefed after this follow-up strike that the survivors were, quote, folks who could still be in the fight with, quote, access to radios and that, quote, there was a link-up point of another potential boat.

19:22Drugs were still there. So he is basically saying that those who, you know, lawmakers are calling shipwrecked were actually, as he said, still in the fight. That seems to be DOD's justification that these survivors were still a threat and were still engaging. And of course, this week, Trump administration officials said that they captured an oil tanker with ties to Venezuela. What's the justification there? U.S. officials have said that the tanker was seized because it's under sanction. for transporting oil from Venezuela and Iran in support of foreign terrorist organizations. But as we're recording, this just happened.

20:01So things are still developing. But Trump said on Wednesday, quote, other things are happening, so you'll be seeing that later. So this is very much developing, and there are certainly questions about whether this is a new broadside in Trump's pressure campaign against Nicolas Maduro's regime. Steph Chavez, the FT's U.S. defense correspondent, thanks so much. Thank you. And Stephen, I hope that answers your question. If you listening right now have a question about U.S. politics and the economy, send us a message at the email in the show notes. Make sure to include your name and where you're from.

20:36And if you send us a voice memo, we may even play it on the show.

20:47This was Swamp Notes, the U.S. politics show from the FT. If you want to sign up for the Swamp Notes newsletter, We've got a link to that in the show notes. Our show was produced by Henry Larson, and it was mixed by Kelly Gary. We had help this week from Lauren Fedor. Special thanks to Pierre Nicholson. I'm Sonia Hudson. Our acting co-head of audio is Topher Forges. Original music by Hannes Brown. Check back next week for more U.S. political analysis from the Financial Times.

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