How ICE finds its targets

Friends, colleagues, strangers who signed up for my mailing list and must now suffer the consequences:

I’m dusting off this list (and moving it to a new platform) to share a story I have in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine. It’s about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s systematic hunt for targets in a quiet coastal community in southern Washington State, about who they got—a mom selling a $20 homemade piñata on Facebook, a grandpa, a school social worker, many dozens of others—and about how they got them. I spent more than a year filing public-records requests and trying to reverse-engineer ICE’s investigations, and the short answer to “how” is this: The agency taps into massive pools of data about American residents’ lives, including in supposed sanctuary states like Washington. Car insured and registered in your own name? You’re low-hanging fruit. Pay utility bills? You’re low-hanging fruit. Use social media? You’re low-hanging fruit. The more “American” a person’s life, the more they engage with society, the more they follow the rules, the easier they are to find.

Here’s the beautiful corner of the world where the story takes place:

Port of Peninsula, Nahcotta, WA

And here’s an excerpt from the story (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/magazine/ice-surveillance-deportation.html):

The winter after Donald Trump was elected president, strangers began appearing in a parking lot on southern Washington State’s Long Beach Peninsula, at the port where the oyster boats come and go. Rather than gaze at the bay or the boats or the building-size piles of bleached shells, two men — one thinner, one thicker — stared at the shellfish workers. The strangers sat in their vehicle and watched the workers arrive in their trucks. They watched the workers grab their gear and walk to the docks. The workers watched them watching, too, and they soon began to realize that the men were from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. When the workers made eye contact, the officers nodded politely, but they said very little. For weeks, they just watched. Then the workers began to vanish.

The officers got someone at a restaurant in the town of Long Beach. They got someone else in a predawn takedown at the port. They arrested a man early one morning in nearby Ocean Park and spent the rest of that day looking for another in the town of Chinook. Then, another day, they went back to the port for another morning arrest…

For the ultra-curious, at this same site (mckenziefunk.substack.com) I’ll be posting some of the hundreds of primary documents I collected. First up: Two data-broker lists I received via a public-records request from the Washington Department of Licensing. They detail how DOL driver and vehicle records are sold and resold to some 35,000 private companies, including the data brokers Experian, LexisNexis, R.L. Polk , TransUnion, and Acxiom, netting the department close to $30 million a year. “One of the things that we realized is that we’re not just a public-safety agency,” a DOL official said last year. “We’re very much a data-sharing agency.”

thanks for reading,

Mac