Cottom: ICE is watching you

In the latest stop in Donald Trump’s war on liberal democracy, federal agents in Minnesota have shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti. It was difficult to avoid the videos of what I can only think of as their executions. The images captured by bystanders and immigration agents were reminiscent of the lynching postcards that white spectators once bought and traded — reproductions of retributive violence, tailor-made to titillate and intimidate.

Pretti’s killing, in particular, struck a chord of dismay with a cross section of Americans. There is some small measure of comfort that our public conscience can still be shocked. One may wish that it had happened sooner — when other people died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody this past year or immigrants were rounded up into camps. But whichever abuse convinced you, whichever needless death shocked you, you are here now. You need to pay attention to the guns ICE agents are pointing at all of us. You also need to pay attention to everything happening around the guns.

Just before Jonathan Ross, an ICE agent, pulled the gun that he discharged into Good’s minivan, he was shooting video of the incident on his cellphone.

The gun and the phone are both weapons — one a tool for violence, and the other a tool of control.

We understand what the gun is intended to do. That’s why, finally, opposition to the Trump administration seems to be coalescing around a rallying cry: “Abolish ICE!” It’s another way of saying, control the hand that holds the gun. It is the gun that produces the spectacle of violence from which we cannot, in good conscience, look away.

Yes, we must pay attention to the gun.

But we must also pay attention to the phone.

That phone represents a greater power, one that could outlast Trumpism. ICE knows that it cannot shoot us all. But the Department of Homeland Security is close to being able to track us all.

Trump’s signature domestic policy bill gave ICE $75 billion in new funding and four years to spend it, making ICE the highest funded federal law enforcement agency. The agency is spending big on signing bonuses — 12,000 new officers and agents have been hired with One Big Beautiful Bill money — and cutting-edge military weaponry to use on U.S. streets. The Department of Homeland Security also has been, reportedly, spending some of its budget to collect data on people like you.

The federal government, whether Democratic- or Republican-controlled, has repeatedly failed to institute meaningful, urgently needed regulation of or legislation about data privacy that matches the scale of our risk. For decades, Americans have treated their data like a cheap externality. We trade crumbs of ourselves — our name, phone number, location data — for discounts, convenience and the illusion of safety. Democratic administrations, in particular, thought Silicon Valley CEOs were the good guys. So they enabled their sci-fi aspirations, invited them into the White House inner circle and consulted them on best practices for consumer data. Then, many chiefs turned heel, helping this administration aggressively scale a data dragnet that will eat our civil liberties for lunch, if we let it.

Data is power, control

Many of us have come to believe that our data is something outside of ourselves, when, in fact, data is our self. Through our purchasing patterns and our digital habits, we have produced reams of details about how we live, think, vote and spend. And there is an entire industry of data brokers that collects and packages our data to be bought. Consequently, we live in a world where our data is valuable and our power to protect it is negligible.

Imagine what our country would look like if a federal agency compiled everything it could find about you on the open market and then paired it with your most sensitive personal data and the full weight of the federal surveillance apparatus. The result would be a system that could not only track you but pretty accurately predict your choices, behaviors and vulnerabilities. The agency might decline to tell you how the database would be used — or, worse, deny that such a database exists at all. In these times, we ought to assume the worst-case scenario: that every technological layer added to our democratic institutions has the potential to be hostile to civil liberties.

Already, there are signs that this future may come to pass.

In a citizen video from Maine that has been widely shared online, an ICE agent told a legal observer that he was taking a picture of her license plate to add her to a “nice little database” that will label her a “domestic terrorist.” (A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, later told CNN that “there is no database of ‘domestic terrorists’ run by DHS.”) In any case, the Department of Homeland Security has issued broad internal guidance for ICE agents in Minneapolis to collect “images, license plates, identifications and general information on hotels, agitators, protesters.”

And then on Friday, The New York Times reported that ICE was exploring ways to integrate advertising technologies and the data associated with them into its operations, specifically asking potential vendors the extent to which data could be collected on “people, businesses, devices, locations, transactions, public records.” There’s no word on ICE having a special decoder ring that tracks only the criminals.

Emily Tucker, the director of Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy and Technology, suggested the agency could be constructing a surveillance system that, in my estimation, would make “Minority Report” look like child’s play. Homeland Security, she said, “is increasingly emphasizing ‘interoperability’ in its contracting.” That is a strong sign that the agency wants to connect a range of databases, which could include those with your biometric data, employment data, driving records, credit reports, tax data, social media data, cellphone location data and automated license plate reader data. “They are seeking data about every aspect of the lives of everyone,” she said.

Turbocharge terror

If combined with the facial recognition and social media monitoring commonly deployed by the Department of Homeland Security, those reams of data would turbocharge ICE’s terror campaign in the short term and destroy American civil liberties in the long term. Should this surveillance infrastructure live up to its technical potential, it would be a leviathan that our 250-year-old Constitution almost certainly cannot restrain.

I spoke on the phone last week to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who has been trying, futilely, for years to pass legislation to protect Americans’ data from federal overreach. One such bill passed in the House in 2024 but languished in the Senate. He said that the federal government is “weaponizing private data” against citizens and noncitizens. Of particular concern, he said, was not simply the data about all of us that is available for purchase, but how states are allowing for the federal government’s data smash-and-grab. What this administration cannot buy, it will simply take.

Your state and federal data is the stuff you are compelled to provide, the data whose accuracy you worry about because a mistake can disrupt your Social Security benefits or put you at odds with the IRS. The Trump administration has been taking advantage of state-level data that has been aggregated by a third-party nonprofit data clearinghouse called Nlets. It was established to help local, national and international agencies share data, including DMV data, about known criminal activity. In practice, there are far too few restrictions on who can use that data and how they can use it. A handful of states has enacted restrictions on ICE’s access to the DMV data stored with Nlets, but the vast majority effectively give federal agencies self-service, direct access to it. So a tool meant to make DMV data sharing frictionless for law enforcement agencies also acts like a privacy Trojan horse, because agencies don’t need just cause or a warrant to look at it.

You don’t need to understand how digital tracking works or have a degree in constitutional law to grasp what is happening to your privacy. You need only know this: Whatever is happening with your data, it is important enough to the most egregiously lawless administration in American history that it be collected and consolidated. It is important enough that a federal cowboy kept one hand on his phone even as his other hand reached for his gun.

Tressie McMillan Cottom is a columnist for The New York Times.