Report says ICE uses Facebook to track undocumented immigrants.
Undocumented immigrants targeted then rounded up for deportation
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is using backend Facebook data to track down undocumented immigrants targeted for deportation, according to a report by The Intercept.
Documents and emails obtained by the publication through a public records request provide a rare glimpse into one of the tactics ICE uses to monitor undocumented immigrants before rounding them up. In one case, several agents were in touch with an investigator in Las Cruces, New Mexico, to track down information about a particular individual, and eventually obtained backend Facebook data showing when the account was accessed. It also revealed the IP addresses corresponding to each login, The Intercept reported.
An investigator with Homeland Security Investigations, ICE’s investigative unit, then emailed a “Facebook business record” showing the suspect’s phone number and the location of each of their logins during a specific time period.
ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday afternoon. Facebook declined to comment for The Intercept report.
The revelations come as Facebook faces mounting criticism over how users’ personal data was ac-
cessed by third parties for political purposes.
Reports last week revealed that Cambridge Analytica — a Londonbased data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign — had accessed the personal information of 50 million Facebook users without their permission. Federal regulators are investigating the data breach, and politicians are mulling new privacy rules that could hamstring tech firms.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has since apologized, admitting his company “made mistakes” in handling its more than 2.2 billion users’ information.
A semiannual transparency report detailing the number of government requests for user data it received
showed that from January 2017 through June 2017, Facebook received 32,716 requests for data from 52,280 users, the Intercept reported. It’s unclear how many of these requests came from ICE.