By now, the videos of immigration agents holding up their phones to people’s faces or scanning license plates are everywhere. While the exact reasons may seem murky, experts say one thing is clear: The ongoing federal crackdown is being powered by a vast surveillance network that has spread far beyond immigrant communities.
Surveillance technology experts and digital rights advocates told Sahan Journal that they are alarmed about the ability of more than 3,000 Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Patrol agents in Minnesota to surveil, monitor, and collect data on-the-go during field operations – from facial recognition technology to ‘stingrays’ that collect information from phones by impersonating cell phone towers.
Experts say these tools not only help agents in what the Trump administration calls the largest immigration crackdown in U.S. history identify specific targets to detain, but also allow them to monitor entire neighborhoods at once, sweeping citizens and non-citizens alike into a broad surveillance dragnet.
Faced with grassroots resistance in Minnesota and widespread accusations that federal agents are acting lawlessly, officials say some agents are being withdrawn. But Cooper Quintin, senior technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that the existence of such troubled agencies with advanced surveillance tools “should be concerning to everyone.”
Using surveillance technology to determine potential detainees
Some recent examples show how much information immigration officials in the field have at their disposal.
On Jan. 14, immigration officials scanned the license plate of a gray sedan with their phones; a federal database told them not only who it belonged to, but that the owner did not have legal status in the country. Agents started a traffic stop. The driver, Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna, fled, and a chase ensued. It ended in the North Minneapolis house where Julio Cesar Sosa Celis lived, and where he was shot in the leg by immigration officials.
Weeks earlier, on Nov. 26, federal agents showed up outside Jeffrey Suazo’s home in St. Paul. Initially, his family says, they were looking for someone else. They encountered Suazo outside, followed him inside the house, and — to his family’s surprise — appeared to know his name and who else was inside, including a child. “Jeffrey, come out, we’re gonna get you one way or another,” his family members recalled agents calling out to him.
Quintin said that ICE can synthesize a vast array of data to determine its targets. The information includes government databases such as tax and immigration records, and data collected through airport security screenings, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) facial scans, and interactions with customs at borders. It also buys data from commercial and media databases and private-sector data, including location data collected from mobile phone advertising, license plate reader systems that track vehicle movements, and large aggregated databases run by companies such as LexisNexis and TLO XP. These private databases compile and link multiple types of personal information, such as vehicle records, home addresses, and other identifying data, into detailed individual profiles.
It also has access to a database of health and auto insurance claims and is using it to locate people targeted for deportation, 404 Media reported. The database contains personal data including names, home addresses, phone numbers, tax identification numbers, and license plate information.
On the streets, ICE and CBP have access to Mobile Fortify, an app that scans people’s faces to determine their citizenship in a matter of seconds. “For years, ICE has had mechanisms by which they are able to, either by using facial recognition technology or fingerprints, do a quick scan of individuals in the street to determine whether or not they are already within the Department of Homeland Security System, and whether or not they are arrestable,” said Amy Fischer, director of refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International USA.
In this video, Customs and Border Patrol agents appear to be using that technology on Minneapolis resident Nimco Omar. They can be seen scanning her face after she refused to show identification, saying she is a U.S. citizen. An agent held up his phone to her face, and moments later, they walked away, probably because they determined her citizenship.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has no real reason to be collecting biographic information of U.S. citizens, Fischer said. “It is beyond the mission of what they do,” she said. “There is no transparency about what exactly they’re doing with this information, if they’re putting it in a database, and what they’re doing with the database.”
Many immigrants are already under some type of electronic surveillance – like ankle monitors, special cellphones and watches – as part of their immigration processes. ICE says these Alternatives to Detention (ATD) “ensure compliance with release conditions and provide important case management services for non-detained aliens.”
That was the case with Liberian immigrant Gibson Garrison, who was arrested at his home after immigration officials battered down his door. Garrison had had a check-in with his ICE supervisor two weeks prior to his arrest, and had an ankle monitor on for about two years.
Immigrants like Garrison often live in close-knit communities, and that means monitoring one individual can inadvertently expose others around them to surveillance. “It basically gives ICE an eye into their home and to their apartment, and into their community,” Fischer said. As global technological capability expands, so does ICE’s surveillance dragnet.
“We have an administration that is fully embracing it, and expanding its use to this point where we’re really seeing how dangerous and how scary this can be in real life,” Fischer said.
The far-reaching tech
Surveillance technology that once was deployed by the U.S. in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, and used along the U.S. border have now been redirected domestically, according to experts. And as sophisticated as it is, it is not error free.
Earlier this month, 404 Media reported that ICE is using an app called ELITE (Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement) that populates the map – it could be a block, a neighborhood, or an entire city – with potential deportation targets, and brings up a dossier on each person. It provides a confidence score on a person’s current address.
Another tool, Weblock, has the locations of millions of phones because of advertising data generated from apps. Weblock is able to surveil the locations of millions of people’s phones, and ICE is able to get that data without a warrant, Quintin said.
Federal agents also use stingray tracking devices, known as cell-site simulators, which mimic cell towers to force nearby phones to connect, allowing agents to locate a target’s device. In the process, the technology also captures data from bystanders’ phones.
A 2022 report by Georgetown University found that in 2022:
- ICE had scanned the driver’s license photos of 1 in 3 adults.
- ICE had access to the driver’s license data of 3 in 4 adults.
- ICE was tracking the movements of drivers in cities home to 3 in 4 adults.
- ICE could locate 3 in 4 adults through their utility records.
- ICE built its surveillance dragnet by tapping data from private companies and state and local bureaucracies.
- ICE spent approximately $2.8 billion between 2008 and 2021 on new surveillance, data collection and data-sharing programs.
Yet, it is likely that there still is much more technology that remains largely hidden. Last year, ICE paid $30 million to Palantir to build ImmigrationOS, a surveillance system that streamlines the identification and deportation of immigrants.
Because much of this data is collected without a warrant, there is little to no oversight or accountability. “We’ve built this horrifying Orwellian surveillance industry over the last 10 to 20 years, and now ICE is buying access to all of it,” Quintin said. And it’s not error free.
Chris Weiland, the chair of Restore the 4th Minnesota, which fights surveillance that infringes Fourth Amendment rights, said that “mistakes in the system will compound with the lack of care” by federal agents. Given that these tools often claim complete accuracy, agents are prone to believe them rather than a potential target for deportation who presents actual documents.
Plus, Fischer said, facial recognition technology itself is also inherently racist, not accurately reading faces of certain races or ethnicities. “When you try and automate these types of decisions, oftentimes they replicate racist and prejudicial patterns,” Fischer said. That’s because the technology is based on racial inequities baked into our society.
Invasive surveillance technologies like these violate Fourth Amendment rights, Fischer and Weiland said. The Fourth Amendment protects individuals against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, ensuring the right to privacy.
Community organizers feel it firsthand
On Tuesday, CNN reported that DHS asked federal agents temporarily assigned to the city to “capture all images, license plates, identifications, and general information on hotels, agitators, protestors, etc., so we can capture it all in one consolidated form.”
Multiple community organizers said they have felt the impact of that surveillance and monitoring first hand.
Photographer and Sahan Journal freelancer Chris Juhn was following a few SUVs with tinted windows when one of the cars stopped ahead of him, and an ICE agent stepped out, clicked his photos and left. “I’m from the press,” Juhn said, holding up his press ID. “I don’t care,” the agent said before walking back to the car.
Weiland theorized that they could be building a database of people they might target, or could simply be trying to intimidate them.
Miguel Brito, community organizer at West Side Community Organization, was responding to an ICE alert when he saw agents taking photos of him in his car. A few days later, his family saw “suspicious vehicles” which he described as SUVs with tinted windows (which are often used by ICE agents), parked outside their house. “They’re intimidating folks, you know, they’re trying to intimidate our neighbors.”
Mary Anne Ligeralde Quiroz, the co-founder of Indigenous Roots Cultural Center, has been actively responding to ICE alerts and raids. She said that following the ICE raid at Centromex Supercardo in St. Paul last December, she was being followed by what looked like federal agents. “I was super paranoid those two days. I was contemplating getting a hotel room with the kids,” she said, so as to not lead agents to her home. “I think after that, I was just like, okay, yep, we’re just all getting surveilled.” Quiroz said she has had patrollers step back from observing ICE after they were photographed by agents.
“I’ve been told, “We have your face now,” said Miguel Hernandez, a member of Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAC). Hernandez said the organization operates under the assumption that ICE is always listening, and that federal agents have infiltrated their Signal chats. “There’s only a certain amount of exposure that I can accept until it becomes dangerous and worrisome for my health,” he said. “Just simple mistakes now will have a lot more worse consequences if I’ve become a target of federal officers.”
“To me, it signals the fact that this was never about legality. This is never about keeping people safe,” Hernandez said. “It’s such a systemic machine of oppression, that now you are in the trenches with your community, and now you will also be oppressed with them.”
Community organizers said that even though they were aware of the risks of surveillance, their concerns have grown as federal agents have flooded the Twin Cities. Quiroz said community networks are resisting by expanding the number of people who might deliver food to a family or changing cars if they are giving someone a ride to work. They have also been doing their own form of facial recognition, taking pictures of agents and circulating amongst local social media channels.
Tech and surveillance experts emphasize that everyone, no matter their immigration status, should take basic precautions to limit surveillance of their personal information.
In a consumer alert issued earlier this month, Attorney General Keith Ellison urged Minnesotans to take steps such as disabling location services on phones, disabling biometric authentication such as FaceID or TouchID, regularly updating software, and using secure communication tools with end-to-end encryption to protect themselves from DHS surveillance.
Although the surveillance can seem pervasive, such steps make it harder to access individual data, Fischer and Quintin said. “They want people to live in fear,” Fischer said. “They want people to feel like there’s nothing they can do. But that’s how they win.”
