These Tech Firms Won’t Tell Us If They Will Help Trump Deport Immigrants

President-elect Donald Trump vows to start his second term with the immediate mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants. Like everything else, deportations of the 21st century are an increasingly data-centric undertaking, tapping vast pools of personal information sold by a litany of companies. The Intercept asked more than three dozen companies in the data business if they’ll help; only four were willing to comment.

While details of the plan have varied, Trump’s intention is clear. He plans to use federal immigration police and perhaps the military to force millions of immigrants out of the United States in an operation the president-elect says has “no price tag.” While the country braces for the possibility of immigrants forcibly rounded up and deported, much of the undertaking will likely remain invisible — the domain of software analysis and database searches of unregulated personal data.

Regardless of immigration status, it is nearly impossible to exist today without creating a trail of records. DMV visits, electricity bills, cellphone subscriptions, bankruptcy proceedings, credit history, and other staples of modern life all wind up ingested and repackaged for sale by data companies. Information like this has helped inform deportation proceedings under both Republican and Democratic leadership.

In 2021, The Intercept reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement paid LexisNexis nearly $17 million to access its database of personal information, which the company says includes 10,000 different data points spanning hundreds of millions of people in the United States. Within just seven months, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept, ICE had searched this database over 1.2 million times.

Similar uses of unregulated private data have become commonplace for immigration and border authorities. In 2020, Protocol and the Wall Street Journal reported on the extensive use of location and other personal data gleaned from smartphone apps by companies like Gravy Analytics and Venntel and resold to ICE and Customs and Border Protection. ICE “has used the data to help identify immigrants who were later arrested,” according to sources who spoke to the Journal.

Analytic software sold by Palantir has been instrumental to ICE’s deportation efforts; reporting by The Intercept showed the company’s tools were used in a 2017 operation targeting unaccompanied minors and their families.

Last year, Motherboard reported CBP had purchased access to Babel Street software that “lets a user input a piece of information about a target—their name, email address, or telephone number—and receive a bevy of data in return,” including “social media posts, linked IP address, employment history, and unique advertising identifiers associated with their mobile phone.”

To see whether corporate America will support Trump’s promised anti-immigrant operation The Intercept reached out to data and technology companies that hold immense quantities of personal information or sell analytic software useful to an agency like ICE. The list includes obscure data brokers that glean intimate personal details from advertising streams, mainstream cellular phone providers, household-name social networks, predictive policing firms, and more.

The list is by no means exhaustive. Private firms that quietly collect and sell personal data that could be of use to immigration authorities are innumerable and ever-growing. Some of these companies, like Meta, may not directly sell personal records to third-party customers in the manner of LexisNexis but could be asked to aid in immigration enforcement if presented with a legal request. At times, social media companies have opted to fight such requests they consider overly broad or invasive.

In 2016, as Trump prepared to begin his first term, The Intercept asked nine major tech firms whether they would help build a nationwide “Muslim registry,” as he had pledged during his campaign. Initially, only one — Twitter — even responded (the answer was no). Eventually, Facebook (as Meta was then known), Apple, Microsoft, and Google stated on the record that they too would not help build a computerized list of Muslims. The country now faces the prospect of another nationally polarizing MAGA campaign pledge, again with horrific civil liberties implications, and again requiring the aid or at least cooperation of one or many technology firms.

As in 2016, The Intercept posed the same question to each company, and requested a yes or no response: Would your company provide the Trump administration with data or other technical services to help facilitate mass deportation operations, either voluntarily, in response to a legal request, or via a paid contract?

This is how they responded.