When you open a new credit card, you necessarily give the credit card company your address. You probably expect that information to remain with your bank.
But when you open a new credit card or change your address on file, your address leaves your credit card provider, travels through a web of middlemen companies, and ends up with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which can then search, analyze, or pair that data with other pieces of information about your life without a warrant.
404 Media has mapped out this supply of data by reviewing U.S. government procurement records and internal documents from companies providing the information. It highlights the sometimes unexpected ways ICE is gaining access to peoples’ personal information as the agency continues to acquire and leverage all sorts of data.
The agency is buying information not just for immigration enforcement but to also investigate what the administration describes as ‘voter fraud.’ ICE officials have also repeatedly attempted to intimidate legal observers of ICE activity.
“No one signing up for a credit card thinks they're giving data brokers a thumbs-up to sell their personal information to ICE. Not only is it an outrageous violation of our privacy, it's impossible for Americans to opt out,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement.
Here’s how that data supply chain works:
You Open a Credit Card
Whenever you open a credit card, or update your personal information, the
credit card company provides your data to credit bureaus.
Credit Header Data
This is the personal data included at the top of your credit report. While the
credit report itself has stronger legal protections, the credit header data does
not.
Full Name
SSN
Phone Number
Address
Email address
Credit Bureaus
These companies are tasked with tracking peoples' credit. Experian and Equifax are
mentioned in the documents 404 Media obtained. TransUnion is another credit
bureau, but it has its own data selling product.
CLEAR
The credit bureaus provide the credit header data to Thomson Reuters, which
incorporates it into CLEAR. CLEAR is the company's investigative data product. It
brings together all sorts of data from different sources so customers can locate
individuals. Thomson Reuters sells access to CLEAR to law enforcement agencies.
ICE
ICE buys access to CLEAR and is able to query its data without a warrant. CLEAR is
also integrated with tools that ICE uses to find which neighborhoods to raid,
including ELITE, a system worked on by Palantir. ELITE gives ICE a "confidence
score" of a person's current address.
Laura Rivera, an attorney at Just Futures Law, told 404 Media “Most people are shocked to learn that anytime they open a credit card or phone account, their home address and other personal information is exposed to anyone willing to pay for it on the data broker market. Anytime we update our home address on these accounts, credit bureaus get the updates within 24 hours and share it broadly with other data brokers, thanks to legal loopholes that leave our personal information open to misuse and abuse.”
“The unregulated trade of credit header data hurts all of us, but it especially harms communities that are overpoliced, like Black and Brown people, immigrants, and people seeking reproductive care, enabling stalking, harassment, and even arrest and deportation. In our current climate, militarized immigration forces leverage credit header data to locate community members without a warrant. This is a blatant abuse of our personal data and lawmakers need to step in to rein it in,” she added.
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*Do you work at ICE, CBP, or a company selling data or technology to those agencies? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.*
Credit header is the information at the top of your credit report, including your name, address, and contact information. You give this information to financial institutions, who in turn give it to the country’s credit bureaus that keep track of everyone’s credit.
Those bureaus then repurpose the data and sell it or provide it to other companies. In this case, that includes Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters is known for the Reuters news service, but it is also a data broker and sells an investigative tool called CLEAR to private and government clients.
404 Media obtained an internal list of the data suppliers that feed into CLEAR. It included “Equifax Credit Header Records” and “Experian Credit Header Records,” indicating that CLEAR gets its credit header data from those two credit bureaus. 404 Media verified this data supply chain with a Thomson Reuters employee familiar with CLEAR. 404 Media granted multiple sources in this article anonymity to protect them from retaliation.
Thomson Reuters then sells access to CLEAR to various government agencies, including ICE. This month 404 Media reported ICE plans to pay Thomson Reuters $125 million for access to CLEAR to investigate immigration fraud and what the agency describes as “voters fraud.” 404 Media’s report on this sale came a day after President Trump held a conspiracy-laden press conference about election and voting security. Commentators widely believe this is Trump laying the groundwork for undermining the legitimacy of the upcoming midterm elections.
Armed with this and other data, ICE is then able to use it to find where people the agency is interested in may live. An internal ICE user guide for ELITE — a Palantir-made app ICE uses to find which neighborhoods to raid — lists CLEAR as a source for its address “confidence score.”
The data in CLEAR may not always be accurate though, potentially leading to ICE targeting the wrong location. “The data quality is way worse than people expect,” the Thomson Reuters employee familiar with CLEAR told 404 Media. “Combining disparate data sources into singular profiles is fundamentally a difficult problem, and a lot of superfluous stuff comes along. Stuff like the data we get from other sources might be bad, like your name showing up on a relative’s address because of a shared bill and suddenly you live there.”
“There is a ton of data out there about everyone, but organizing it is very much not a solved problem,” the source added.
When reporting about Thomson Reuters’ sale of CLEAR access to ICE, a Thomson Reuters spokesperson originally told 404 Media “It’s inaccurate to connect CLEAR to ICE and its deportation and enforcement operations.” After we asked for comment on the more recent $125 million contract, the spokesperson said, “We prohibit the use of CLEAR for the purpose of identifying and locating noncriminal immigrants or undocumented individuals with the intention of deportation solely on the basis of the individual’s immigration status. We take this restriction seriously, and we enforce it. We continue to work with our customers to provide technology and services that support investigations into areas of national security and public safety, such as child exploitation, human trafficking, narcotics and weapons trafficking, and fraud/financial crime.”
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was taking steps to close the sale of this sort of credit header data, but the Trump administration gutted the agency. “President Biden's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed a rule to close this loophole, but Trump killed it, along with the rest of the bureau, last year. There’s growing agreement in Congress that it’s time to close this loophole,” Senator Wyden, who has long tried to close this data buying avenue, added.
Neither Experian nor Equifax responded to a request for comment. When contacted recently about its investigative capabilities, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said, “Like other law enforcement agencies, ICE employs various forms of technology to investigate criminal activity and support law enforcement efforts.”