A team of FBI and ICE agents used an "anti-terror tool” the ACLU is calling “invasive surveillance technology” to locate and arrest an undocumented restaurant worker in Detroit, the “first public acknowledgment that agents are using secret devices that masquerade as a cell tower to find people who entered the U.S. illegally, privacy and civil liberty experts said.” With agents required to obtain a judge’s permission to use the device, it could set a dangerous precedent and only adds to the frightening steps Trump’s deportation force is taking—including stalking undocumented immigrants outside courthouses and churches—in their effort to sweep up as many people as possible. “Once you start giving agencies fancy toys, and somebody is making money off of it, they are going to use them for more things, and ultimately oppress your rights,” warned one digital rights group:
The secret device was used in March by a team of FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Metro Detroit to find Rudy Carcamo-Carranza, 23, a twice-deported restaurant worker from El Salvador whose only brushes with the law involve drunken driving allegations and a hit-and-run crash.
The use of the cell tower simulator comes amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and attempt to temporarily ban travel from six Muslim-majority nations.
The cell-site simulator device, known as a Hailstorm or Stingray, tricks nearby phones into providing location data and can interrupt cellular service of all devices within the targeted location.
“While the warrant does ensure a modicum of judicial oversight, it is troubling to see the government using invasive surveillance technology on the streets of America to grease the wheels of the Trump administration’s deportation machine,” said an attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. “This is the first warrant I have seen specifically showing ICE’s use of a cell-site simulator in an immigration enforcement operation.”
More from The Verge:
Use of the devices is widespread within law enforcement, but remained secret for many years. The devices were only made public after a protracted legal appeal resulting from a fraud case. Among other projects, the US Marshals service deployed the devices from small, low-flying planes as a way of locating a single fugitive in a dense urban area.
The Department of Homeland Security (which includes ICE) operates at least 124 Stingray devices, according to a congressional report last year. In 2015, DHS issued an agency-wide policy requiring a search warrant to deploy the devices.
This development should be a major concern for all, for the simple fact that this technology could very well gather information from cellular devices that are not the target of the warrant. Collateral arrests—undocumented immigrants who weren’t the target of an immigration operation but were arrested anyway because they happened to be at the wrong time at the wrong time—are up. Assuming other law-abiding immigrant family members get caught up in the surveillance, they could be arrested too. DHS and congressional Republicans are so far refusing to provide any oversight to an agency as incompetent, dishonest, and ruthless as ICE—in fact, they want to escalate the terror already being inflicted on immigrant families. So is this really something that ICE can actually be trusted with?