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Thread: In late 2017, I heard about an immigration crackdown in the supposed sanctuary state of Washington. ICE arrested a mom selling a piñata on Facebook. A grandpa who'd filed U.S taxes for almost 20 years. A school social worker. Dozens from one coastal county.
ICE officers rolled in knowing names, nicknames, numbers, addresses, license plates, emails, social-media handles, patterns of life. "They knew everything," residents said. I decided to find out how. Many months + many records requests later, some answers: nytimes.com/2019/10/02/mag…
One lesson: Sanctuary isn’t a meaningful concept—let alone coherent policy—if jurisdictions block ICE from their jails but not from their data. In WA state, until they got cut off in 2018, ICE officers searched DMV databases tens of thousands of times a year.
A second lesson: It's harder to stop data-sharing than it was to start. It’s not that norms are changing and our personal info is just out there on social media, not just that. It’s that after 9/11 we networked system after system so we’d never again fail to “connect the dots.”
Third lesson: A deportation machine that uses public records and other open-source data—such as social media—to locate targets will naturally surface longtime residents, rule-followers, good hombres, people fully engaged in American society who aren’t (or weren’t) trying to hide.
Fourth lesson: Without social media and without private contractors providing data services, including @thomsonreuters, @VigilantSol, and many, many others, ICE would have a harder time finding people where they live.
Fifth: Those same data brokers sell to other agencies big and small, federal and local. This machine starts but doesn’t have to end with immigrants. The same infrastructure harnessed by ICE could be used to profile and target any category of undesirable.
Sixth lesson: You can’t just delete your account, not with utilities and phone companies selling your info to data brokers, not with facial recognition and automated license plate readers spreading to every corner. We’re datafying the physical space.
The journalist who first wrote about ICE’s crackdown in Pacific County, WA, is local legend Sydney Stevens of @chinookobserver. Her 13-part series helped the paper win a statewide prize, deservedly so. Read the series here: pcisupport.org/2018/05/25/chi…
Next to bring attention to Pacific County’s immigration crackdown was @NinaShapiro of @seattletimes, who also first peeled back the curtain on the WA Department of Licensing’s aid to ICE, prompting @GovInslee to order a statewide data-sharing review: seattletimes.com/seattle-news/t…
Some of the public-records documents from Pacific County were first obtained by local ACLU @peoplepower volunteers, some of whom went on to form their own nonprofit, Pacific County Immigrant Support: pcisupport.org
For those of you who’ve read through this whole thread (hi, Mom!), I’ll be posting some of the documents from my public-records requests here: mckenziefunk.substack.com
Also, a hat tip to @georgejoseph94, whose early and ongoing work on ICE’s access to data has broken much ground. See, for instance: npr.org/sections/codes…
