by Jo Ellen Nott

When the Ortega military crack-down against dissidents in Nicaragua paralyzed most of the country in 2018, Norman became desperate to earn money when his livelihood of making ceramic souvenirs paying $133 a month vanished. The undocumented immigrant made the life-threatening trip from Central America through Mexico, made it across the border into Texas and connected with other Nicaraguans. Through them, Norman found a job in a Midwestern meat packing plant with an employer who did not require documentation to hire low-paid labor in its slaughterhouse. Norman numbed himself to the horrors of stunning pigs with electrodes to the head and watching them scream in pain as they tumbled into the scalding tank while still alive. He learned survival English and in a couple of years was able to rent a modest apartment. Norman is overwhelmed with joy at the possibility of bringing his aging mother and motherless son to live in his new home.

Despite his herculean effort to find employment and a safe home far from Nicaragua, Norman lives in the shadow of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) agency that could deport him on the shifting winds of political immigration policy. ICE has used data to track immigrants that most citizens could not imagine it had access to. Information essential to signing up for power and water was being used clandestinely by ICE officials to track and extract undocumented immigrants.

ICE paid 21 million dollars for access to the Citizen Law Enforcement Analysis and Reporting (“CLEAR”) private database owned by multinational media conglomerate Thomson Reuters (total revenues $1.53 billion in August 2021). The irony of ICE spending millions of dollars to track and deport undocumented immigrant workers who occupied 70% of essential jobs during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic should not be lost on any of us. In fact, one in five essential workers in the country is an immigrant according to the Department of Homeland Security and the American Community Survey of 2019.

In The Guardian, Moustafa Bayoumi revealed that the CLEAR database contains more than 400,000,000 names from 80 utility companies. The Washington Post reported in February of 2021 that “this information has been mined by ICE for immigration surveillance and enforcement operations.” Nina Wang of the Georgetown Law Center for Privacy and Technology pointed out that “the database offered ICE officers a way to pursue undocumented immigrants who may have tried to stay off the grid by avoiding activities such as getting driver’s licenses but could not live without paying to keep the lights on at home.”

Thanks to Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden’s relentless opposition to warrantless federal surveillance, utility companies will no longer allow consumers’ cable, phone, and power bill data to be resold to third parties after it is shared with credit-reporting entity Equifax. Third parties such as media giant Reuters profit handsomely from unregulated data brokering. Internet blog Techdirt cites Wyden’s pressure on the National Consumer Telecom & Utilities Exchange (“NCTUE”) for the change. But, as Techdirt notes, “Reuters isn’t the only player in the data market. There are plenty of third parties purchasing data and selling it to government agencies and other third parties.” Wyden has called on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to investigate “how data gathered and released for profit is ending up in the hands of law enforcement without court approval or oversight.” Senator Wyden’s advocacy will hopefully benefit all the Normans working in grueling essential jobs from being unfairly deported by ICE. Wyden’s efforts to keep American enterprises on a tight leash regarding the brokerage of our personal data to law enforcement will benefit all Americans who deserve privacy and due process.

Sources: dentonsmunoz.com, fwd.us, theguardian.com, reuters.com, techdirt.com, nbcnews.com, wyden.senate.gov, washingtonpost.com, nbcnews.com

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