Your Phone Could Lead ICE Right to You

Immigration officials now have access to a tool that can map the movements of phones across whole neighborhoods, raising new alarms among privacy advocates. Documents obtained by 404 Media show that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has purchased access to two products from Penlink called Webloc and Tangles. Webloc lets users draw shapes on a digital map—ie, workplaces, protest sites—and pull up all the phones there during a chosen time window, then trace those devices to other sites, like homes and workplaces. An internal ICE memo says agents can query this commercial data sans warrant. "This is probably unconstitutional," says Don Bell of the Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight, per the Independent. The data comes from the murky location-data market, with info harvested from ordinary apps, then sold by brokers, per 404.

Once a device is flagged by Webloc, the system can reconstruct its travel history locally and nationwide, cross-matching phones that show up at multiple sites. Tangles, meanwhile, lets users monitor social media, detect faces in images, run "sentiment analysis" on posts, and maintain watch lists. Civil liberties groups say ICE is exploiting a legal gray zone to sidestep the Supreme Court's Carpenter vs. US decision, which requires warrants for historical location data from telecoms. The agency argues people have "voluntarily" shared data with third parties by using apps, undermining any expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment. The ACLU says that reasoning is "self-serving," warning the system enables pervasive tracking "at an agent's mere whim," with immigrant and minority communities likely to bear the brunt; anti-ICE protesters will also be targets, per the Brennan Center.

Sen. Ron Wyden, a critic of the location-data sector, says the program gives "Trump's shock troops" a powerful tool against people "who have done nothing wrong" and contends it violates federal law unless users clearly consent to government sales—something he says isn't happening, per 404. ICE has spent more than $2.3 million on Penlink licenses since September, even after a 2023 inspector general report found ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and the Secret Service broke rules using similar commercial-location datasets and lacked adequate safeguards. In a statement, Penlink said its tools use only public or commercially available data, are meant to "advance criminal investigations and save lives," and are governed by "strict compliance" and "responsible-use standards."