Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have entered into a contract with Vigilant Solutions that will give mass deportation agents access to as many as two billion license plate records, including those belonging to permanent residents and U.S. citizens. “The system gives the agency access to billions of license plate records and new powers of real-time location tracking, raising significant concerns from civil libertarians”:
Vigilant Solutions is a private company that uses partnerships with local law enforcement agencies to gather data from police car cameras, resulting in some 100 million recorded license plate sightings a month. That plate information comes tagged with "a date, time, and GPS coordinates," The Verge writes, meaning that with its contract, ICE can search the database to find "every place a given license plate has been spotted in the last five years." Additionally, if ICE agents want to track a particular car, they can receive phone or email alerts whenever that specific plate is spotted on a Vigilant Solutions-partnered camera.
An assessment by the Department of Homeland Security found that such a database is important for ICE because when "other leads have gone cold," information about the "previous locations of a vehicle can help determine the whereabouts of subjects of criminal investigations or priority aliens to facilitate their interdiction and removal."
“As with any law enforcement tool, its mere existence does not immediately connote abuse or civil rights violations,” notes Think Progress. But that’s giving benefit of the doubt to a dangerous, unleashed immigration agency that has commonly tossed aside the law, disregarded the basic rights of immigrants, racially profiled U.S. citizens in attempts to arrest them, and swept up moms and dads with no criminal record by the thousands.
In Oregon last September, ICE agents attempted to detain a Latino U.S. citizen they assumed was an undocumented man. Agents refused to identify themselves as bystanders or to produce a warrant signed by a judge.
The man and his wife were leaving a courtroom, and later recalled they had been seated near them:
Federal agents mistook a longtime Washington County employee for an [undocumented] immigrant just as a nearby demonstration against arrests of undocumented immigrants ended at the courthouse in Hillsboro.
The mistake rattled Isidro Andrade-Tafolla, a married father of three children who lives in Forest Grove and has worked as a road maintenance worker for the county for nearly 20 years.
"It was frightening, disturbing, humiliating and I'm still trying to process being stopped because of my color and my race," he said Tuesday.
As in Oregon the month after, ICE agents illegally entered a home to harass construction worker Carlos Bolanos and his coworker George Cardenas. Cardenas began shooting the video when the agents refused to identify themselves and defiantly claimed that “we don’t need a warrant to come in this home. No one lives here”:
Cardenas asked repeatedly for the agents' names, but they stood silent or declined to provide them.
"We don't need to introduce ourselves by our names. There's no law that says we have to," one of the agents said.
"There's a law that says you can't come into private property. Did you know that?" Cardenas asked.
"That is correct and you are right," the agent replied.
According to Gizmodo, “as a privacy safeguard in this latest plan, ICE has been granted access to an extant license plate database, but can’t add new data to it, only search what’s available.” But this remains dangerous for all Americans regardless of immigration status:
Additionally, the site reports that users can tag a particular license plate to receive alerts via Vigiliant’s app whenever it’s spotted. ICE agents could add hundreds or even thousands of plates to the “hot list,” as its called, receiving instantaneous updates as plates are sighted on tunnels, bridges, toll booths, or at traffic stops.
As an ACLU report on license plate readers notes, the overwhelming majority of license plate photos taken are from innocent drivers who aren’t suspected of any crimes. A police department in Rhinebeck, NY registered 164,043 plates between April and June of 2011. Ultimately eight of these plates were on the “hot list.”
The report also cites a case of a single car having its location recorded 24 times in a week. Over longer periods of time, it’d be possible to collect extra “intimate” data about a subject—long before they’re made aware of any surveillance.
If you are a natural-born citizen, you might think that mass deportation policies might have nothing to do with you. But that couldn’t be more inaccurate. ICE has been unleashed and has shown itself perfectly willing to trample on citizens and their rights if it means sweeping up more immigrants. We should all be worried about this.
ACLU policy analyst Jay Stanley: "Are we as a society, out of our desire to find those people, willing to let our government create an infrastructure that will track all of us?"