U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has found an insidious new way to work around the hard-fought “sanctuary” protections that hundreds of countiesThe United States has adopted a policy to stop local law enforcement agencies sharing data with their agents. This is a dizzying, privatized surveillance system that was created by LexisNexis, a database corporation.
ICE now has a specialized LexisNexis subscription that allows it to obtain private and public data without a warrant, without subpoenas and without requests to local police departments or sheriff’s offices.
ICE agents can be purchased at a bargain-price of $4.4 Million per year. buy access to vast reams of commercial and public data — 1.5 billion bankruptcy records, 77 million business contacts, 330 million unique cell phone numbers, 11.3 billion name and address combinations, 6.6 billion vehicle registrations and 6.5 billion property records, according to its website.
Through its partnership with LexisNexis, ICE now has access to “Accurint,” a research-and-locate tool tailored for government and law enforcement. This portal is being used in an attempt to avoid sanctuary ordinances across the nation by ICE agents.
Accurint’s “jail booking search” (part of the Accurint Virtual Crime Center) returns a nondescript webpage: A mugshot and a dossier of personal information — name, address, weight, height, citizenship status, Social Security number, employer, and more.
It’s not sleek (the site mostly contains simple black-and-white text fields), but the lackluster interface hides a pernicious, possibly illegal surveillance tool.
It is amazing to see the extent of surveillance in this area. Accurint is a product of LexisNexis, one of the world’s largest commercial data brokers, which boasts access to more than “84 billion public records from over 10,000 disparate sources” — think driver’s licenses, court records, cell phone subscriptions, cable or electricity bills, arrest data, property records, and more — for its customers.
As part a contract for up to $22.1 millionWith a few keystrokes thousands of ICE agents can access real-time jail booking information, including incarceration status, release date, and more for millions of people all across the country, after they have signed up with LexisNexis in 2021. The site is updated approximately every 15 minutes.
LexisNexis Creates a Sprawling Surveillance Device
Accurint is just a small part of a sprawling surveillance apparatus that gives ICE agents access to one of the world’s largest troves of personal information: A vast databaseThe data contained information on hundreds of millions of people and was given to ICE as part the same LexisNexis contract. The data — which includes names, addresses, phone information, utility bills, arrest and release data, and so much more — is simply bought and sold, available to ICE as part of a tidy subscription package.
LexisNexis says it has 283 million active “LexIDs” in its database — its term for individual dossiers of personal information — meaning many tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of people are in its databases. And it’s not only the initial targets swept up in this digital dragnet: A single search can return information on multiple people, as noted by the company itself. LexisNexis says its database can “find connections” between the initial targets and “relatives and business associates.”
If you’re a target of surveillance by ICE, your friends, your family, your colleagues and your associates could all be surveilled as well — pulled into a massive, digital trawling effort by immigration enforcement that goes back to the Obama era and has involved multiple data broker contractors.
LexisNexis signed this contract the same month as ICE’s previous data broker of choice, Thomson Reuters, saw its own ICE contract for these services expire. Thomson Reuters has been under increasing shareholder and government pressure since then. Sen. Ron Wyden, a senator from Vermont, was arrested in December 2013. successfully pushedThomson Reuters has to be removed from access to utility information. Thomson Reuters has also continued to push for the Consumer Protection Bureau’s further actions against data brokers. Thomson Reuters published April 2012 data. announced it would review its ICE contracts for potential human rights violationsResponding to shareholder pressures generated by our #NoTechforICE campaign.
In documents unearthed via Freedom of Information Act requests, the immigration justice groups Mijente and Just Futures Law showed that ICE agents searched LexisNexis more than 1.2 million times over just seven months (between March 2021 and September 2021) — and that hundreds of thousands of searches were conducted by Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), the division of ICE responsible for deportations.
Worse, this data is now being used as a backdoor to skirt sanctuary ordinances across the country — ICE is now often able to access the data it seeks through this privatized database even in cities and states that have hard-fought laws to prevent local law enforcement from cooperating with ICE agents on deportations.
These sanctuary protections, a legacy from years-long immigration organizing, that became especially urgent under Trump are being intentionally undermined.
In a government contracting agreement shared by Mijente and Just Futures Law, ICE’s stated rationale for contracting with LexisNexis was the “increase in the number of law enforcement agencies and state or local governments” that limited data sharing with ICE as part of sanctuary ordinances.
There are hundreds of jurisdictions in which laws prohibit local law enforcement from assisting ICE with deportations. For example, agents can be informed when someone is released from jail. The agency can then simply purchase this data directly from third parties such as LexisNexis. ICE no longer has to rely on local police officers or sheriff’s deputies to tell them when certain people are being released from jail, when they have a parole hearing, or when they’ll next be at the courthouse. ICE can access this information directly and send its agents to pick them up, arrest them, and then deport them.
Avenues of Resistance
But cities and counties are retaliating. Wednesday saw the arrival of Alma E. Anaya, Cook County commissioner in Chicagoland. holding a public hearing investigating whether the county’s contract with LexisNexis and ICE’s contracts with data brokers may violate the county’s sanctuary ordinance. The ICE Chicago field office conducted more than 13,000 searches in the seven-month period covered by our FOIAs — the most of any city in the country except San Diego.
The hearing — the first time that a legislator will investigate ICE’s use of data brokers to skirt sanctuary protections — was prompted by the #NoTechforICE campaign’s recent research report detailing how LexisNexis is used by ICE in Colorado to skirt the state’s sanctuary laws. The report’s findings suggested that ICE is engaging in this practice across the country.
Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition advocates have been organizing in the state as well. Our joint report with CIRC uncovered massive conflicts of interest whereby the very same law enforcement officials tasked with upholding the state’s various sanctuary ordinances also sat on the board of LexisNexis, the company contracted to skirt them. Since then, the group has been meeting with sheriffs and pushing Colorado legislators to update the state’s sanctuary policies to prevent the kind of workarounds that ICE is exploiting in Illinois.
The legal and librarian communities are also fighting back. LexisNexis and its most prominent competitors, Thomson Reuters are widely used by the research and legal and journalism communities: academics librarians lawyers journalists and others scour LexisNexis databases for sources, case file information, news articles, and many other things.
These same communities are calling out the companies for their ICE contract: In the past month, librarians have protested outside. American Librarian Association’s annual conference in Washington, D.C., and American Association of Law Libraries annual conference in DenverLexisNexis must end its contracts with ICE, says the group. More than 2,500 lawyers, law students, scholars, and legal professionals have been affected. signed Mijente’s petitionMijente has been leading since 2018 the #NoTechforICE campaign, urging LexisNexis and ICE to stop working together.
That campaign has pulled together students, tech workers, abolitionists, academics, librarians, lawyers, shareholders, and a variety of others who oppose ICE and Silicon Valley’s collaboration with deportation forces, targeting the contracts that Silicon Valley firms like Palantir and Anduril have with ICE or Customs and Border Protection (CBP). We have mobilized hundreds-strong protestsOutside the headquarters of a tech company, organized shareholder resolutions at leading tech companies, published in-depth reports on research, and once brought a cage to Burning ManIn an effort to stop the anti-immigrant work done by these tech firms.
All immigrant communities are at grave risk from LexisNexis’ surveillance. Regardless who occupies the White House ICE has a mandate under both Democrats and Republicans to detain or deport all undocumented persons in this country. These surveillance contracts last for years, and can outlast any administration’s policies.
The presidential administration could be changed in 2024. If it does, the presidential administration could change. In that case, its immigration agents would have a turnkey surveillance system to target millions across the country.
ICE’s attempts to find a data workaround to sanctuary city laws is a natural consequence of this single-minded focus on deportations — regardless of the surveillance required and regardless of the legal protections in place.
The government must not allow these contracts to be signed in sanctuary cities, counties, libraries, or lawyers. It’s the only way we can ensure a surveillance-free future for immigrants in this country.
