Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been conducting a wide scale, “previously secret surveillance” program that’s collected millions of money transfer records from people who’ve sent money from certain U.S. states to Mexico, and vice versa, Oregon’s senior senator has told the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) watchdog.
Ron Wyden tells DHS inspector general Joseph Cuffari in a Mar. 8 letter that when his office contacted ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) about the program in January, “HSI immediately terminated the program.” Wyden writes that the interaction had represented the first time anyone in Congress had heard about this secretive initiative. He’s calling on Cuffari to open an investigation.
Wyden says in the letter to Cuffari that HSI has used what BuzzFeed News calls administrative subpoenas to obtain more than 6 million records from transfers of $500 and more, spanning Arizona, California, New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico. “HSI obtained these records using a total of eight customs summonses, which it sent to Western Union and Maxitransfers Corporation (MAXI), demanding records for a six-month period following the order.”
The senator’s letter said HSI, which handles criminal investigations, engaged in this wide-scale practice without first seeking approval from the DHS Office of General Counsel, the DHS Office for Civil Liberties, the ICE Office of the Principal Legal Advisor, or the ICE Office of Information Governance and Privacy. He said HSI contacted DHS privacy officials only after his office contacted it. Oops.
Wyden says he supports “legitimate efforts” to combat illegal imports of fentanyl and other opioids, of which the Biden administration has been doing aplenty (to the strange ire of Republicans). But this a very different, and possibly illegal, effort with very clear targets. “Instead of squandering resources collecting millions of transactions from people merely because they live or transact with individuals in a handful of Southwestern states or have relatives in Mexico, HSI and other agencies should focus their resources on individuals actually suspected of breaking the law.”
“Wyden’s claims are just the latest to raise questions about the agency’s use of administrative subpoenas to obtain records, BuzzFeed News reporting, noting ICE’s 2020 attempt to intimidate the news outlet into revealing its confidential sources. ICE later backtracked on that threat. “The DHS inspector general had also reported in 2017 that Customs and Border Protection had misused the customs summons authority in violation of agency policy,” BuzzFeed News continued.
HSI has on a number of occasions attempted to distance itself from ICE’s deportation units, “saying negative reputation hurts their work,” The Washington Post reported in December. But, what we’ve learned so far about this secretive and widespread spying effort doesn’t look too great for HSI, either.
“This dragnet surveillance program from the Department of Homeland Security is illegal, and it is stunning that it was allowed to run for even a single day,” the American Civil Liberties Union’s Nathan Freed Wessler told BuzzFeed News. “Despite a total lack of individualized suspicion, and based only on the happenstance of living in a southwestern state, details of a huge number of people’s private financial transactions with family members and others were funneled straight to the government.”
“Courts have made clear that narrow subpoena authorities like the one DHS relied on cannot be stretched to enable indiscriminate bulk collection of Americans’ personal transactional data,” he continued.
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