This archive report was first published on 23 December 2019.
On May 4, 2018, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official in the Pacific Enforcement Response Center (PERC) used Thomson Reuters CLEAR to find the home address and the address of the parents of a Mexican immigrant. The official then ran the addresses through Google Maps and compared them to pictures the immigrant had posted on Facebook of his father's backyard birthday party.
The Facebook photos confirmed the immigrant's identity, and on May 24, 2018, ICE officers arrested him at a Home Depot in Southern California as he was driving out of the parking lot. The immigrant had been living in the US since he was a year old and reentered the country after previously being deported over a nonviolent felony.
According to court documents, a probe into the immigrant was opened on February 22, 2018, when ICE's National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center generated a lead and forwarded it to an ICE office in Los Angeles. The data analysis system screens data from other federal agencies, as well as commercial data brokers, to match the names of deported persons to recently issued car registrations, utility bills, and mailing addresses.
At his sentencing hearing in January, the immigrant told the judge, “I came back to be with my family. I’m sorry. That’s all.”
