Senators Markey & Wyden Call on ICE to End Invasive Surveillance Practices

In a letter to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Acting Director, Tae D. Johnson, Senators Ed Markey and Ron Wyden “urge[d] [ICE] to end its use of technologies and surveillance tactics that threaten the privacy rights of individuals all across the United States.” The Senators called out ICE’s “dragnet surveillance system” created using facial recognition and the agency’s purchasing of information from data brokers. “These practices,” the Senators state, “raise serious concerns and questions about how ICE surveils the public and avoids key accountability systems.”

EPIC recently published the report, DHS’s Data Reservoir, which analyzes the ways that the Department of Homeland Security, in particular CBP and ICE, collects and circulates location data. In an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, EPIC has obtained thousands of pages related to ICE’s use of facial recognition services. The documents EPIC obtained reveal that ICE, at minimal, considered using facial recognition to track people who threaten their agents.