Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - ICE Is Building a Nationwide Tracking System (and Your Data is In It)

Episode Date: July 25, 2025

Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co The U.S. government is quietly building the largest surveillance system in modern history. In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I break down how agencies like ICE, DHS are weaponizing your personal data including tax filings, medical records, license plate scans, and more, to hunt innocent people down across the country.The Department of Homeland Security is also exploring ways to access IRS data on millions of U.S. citizens "associated with criminal activity" or who have shown support for "terrorism." I break down ICE’s growing surveillance empire, the risks of government data abuse, and the terrifying consequences for civil liberties if we don't fight back. ProPublica article: https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-irs-share-tax-records-ice-dhs-deportationsSubscribe to my newsletter: ⁠⁠https://www.usermag.co⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0 https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz

While the public debates things like the TikTok ban or Instagram design features, the government is quietly building the most invasive data surveillance apparatus in modern history. Welcome back to Free Speech Friday, my series where I cover the fight for free expression, privacy, and civil rights online. For years, the U.S. government, political operatives, and the mainstream media have distracted the public with performative outrage over social media platforms while quietly laying the legal foundation for widespread data harvesting and censorship. Under the guise of protecting kids online or holding big tech accountable, lawmakers are pushing dangerous legislation like mandatory age verification that would create a sprawling surveillance infrastructure that the government can and will weaponize.

This mass expansion of government surveillance that the media again loves to frame as cracking down on big tech is one of the greatest threats to freedom in the 21st century. I've talked a lot about some of these bad tech laws and other videos, but today I want to dig into how government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and ICE are weaponizing personal data in ways that go far beyond their traditional scope. In the past few months alone, we've witnessed a terrifying expansion of ICE's surveillance capabilities. Without warrants and with virtually no oversight, ICE has transformed into a domestic intelligence agency, scraping data from medical systems, government records, and social media posts to hunt down innocent people.

In April, 404 media reported that ICE was planning to build a massive central database using government health, labor, and housing data to find targets for deportation. One of the tools that they're building is called A-track or alien tracker, and it will use data harvesting systems to provide near real-time tracking of people across the country. And I just want to quickly note that while these recent escalations are happening under Trump, Democrats are responsible for this too. Biden provided record funding for ICE and under Biden, ICE investigators used private utility databases covering millions of people to hunt

immigrants down. And under Biden, government agencies increasingly began accessing private data that they were not authorized to access or compile on their own. For instance, as the Washington Post, Drew Harwell reported back in 2021, under Biden, ICE was using private databases and exploiting commercial data sources to access information and data that they were not authorized to compile on their own. The government's reliance on commercial data highlights how real-world surveillance efforts are being fueled by information people may have never expected would land in the hands of law enforcement. And obviously, all of this has been supercharged since Trump took office. Recently, ICE has begun harvesting data from a commercial license plate scanning tool that's primarily

marketed as a surveillance solution for small towns to combat things like carjackings or to help find missing people. In May, 404 media broke the story. that local police across the country were looking people up via flock, the AI-powered automatic license plate reader. ICE and federal law enforcement have been able to leverage flock to side door access

that they don't have any sort of formal contract for. I'll be diving more into the ways that commercial data is weaponized in future episodes, but while consumer-focused companies are harvesting data on public via commercial means, the government is harvesting data through government agencies. And one agency with a massive amount

of highly detailed personal data on hundreds of millions of people is the IRS. Just last week, ProPublica reported that the IRS is seeking to build a vast surveillance system to share millions of people's private taxpayer data with ICE. ProPublica obtained the blueprint for this unprecedented plan, which will create an on-demand computer system that allows ICE to obtain the home addresses of people that it's seeking to deport. This home address data is something that ICE has been dying to get a hold of. Last month, ICE attempted to force the IRS to turn over the personal home addresses of over 7.3 million people.

The acting general counsel at the IRS refused, and two days later, he was pushed out of his job. Elon Musk's Doge has also been pushing the IRS to provide taxpayer data to immigration agents. And when the tax agency's first acting general counsel refused Doge's request, he was also replaced. A spokesperson for the White House told ProPublica that ICE's use of IRS data was legal and necessary to fulfill Trump's campaign pledge to carry out mass deportations of illegal criminal aliens. But one former senior IRS official who's been advising the IRS told ProPublica, quote, there's just no way ICE has seven million real criminal investigations. That's a fantasy.

He said that the demands from the Department of Homeland Security were unprecedented and that the agency was basically trying to coerce the IRS into doing a big data dump on millions of innocent law-abiding people in America. The computer system that the IRS is now building, which they want to launch, by the way, by the end of this month, would basically give ICE agents automatic access to people's tax data and mass. IRS insiders who reviewed a copy of the plans for ProPublica said that this could result in immigration agents rating wrong or outdated addresses. Quote, if this program is implemented in its current form, it's extremely likely that incorrect addresses will be given to the DHS and individuals will be wrongly targeted, said one IRS engineer. This is especially terrifying, as we're already seeing dozens of people wrongly deported due to clerical errors or other misunderstandings.

Many of these individuals have been shipped off to El Salvador's notorious Seacott super prison. Kilmar Obrego Garcia, a Maryland father of two, who was legally protected from deportation by a 2019 court order, was sent to Seacot on March 15th due to a, quote, administrative error. In March 2025 alone, approximately 137 Venezuelan and Salvadorian, migrants, nearly all with valid asylum claims and no criminal backgrounds, were sent straight to Seacot, bypassing trials and hearings. Human rights experts and courts have repeatedly condemned these deportations, but countless innocent American deportees are trapped in one of the world's most notorious and brutal superprisons. And right now, there's pressure from the White House to

deport a daily quota of at least 3,000 people per day. One federal agent working with ICE on deportations said that the primary bottleneck that the agency has been hamstrung by is outdated addresses. More accurate data on people like the address that they recently used to file taxes could drastically speed up arrests and deportations. In early March, immigrants rights groups sued the IRS hoping to block this plan. They argued that coordination between the DHS and the IRS was illegal, but a judge ruled against them saying that the data sharing was legal under current privacy laws. And if you think all of this is going to stop immigrants, you're delusional. The Department of Homeland Security is already looking for ways

to expand their access to data in ways that would allow Homeland Security officials to garner IRS data on Americans being investigated for various crimes. And this comes at a time when the Trump administration is making threats to deport legal U.S. citizens. ProPublica also reported that last month an ICE attorney proposed authorizing new data requests on people, quote, associated with criminal activities, which may include United States. state citizens or lawful permanent residence. The status of this proposal is unclear, but the government being able to collect sensitive personal data on any U.S. citizen, quote, associated with criminal activities should terrify you, especially when this new computerized system will be so undeniably error-prone.

So let's talk for a minute about how this system would work. The software that's being built right now would allow law enforcement offices to collect enormous swaths of confidential data in bulk through an automated computerized process. The DHS would first send the IRS a spreadsheet containing the names and previous addresses of the people that it's targeting. The request would include things like the date of final removal order, which is a criminal statute that ICE is currently using to investigate people and the tax period for the information that they're seeking. This new computerized system would then attempt to match the information provided by the DHS to a specific taxpayer identification number, which is the primary way that the IRS identifies people in its databases. Once the system,

makes a match, it accesses the person's associated tax filing and pulls their personal address and other data collected during their last tax filing. Then the system will produce a new spreadsheet enriched with taxpayer data that contains DHS's targets last known addresses. If you think this sounds confusing and messy, you're not alone. Tax and privacy experts who spoke to ProPublica say that they're terrified of how such a powerful yet crude system could make dangerous mistakes. Because the system starts with a name instead of a taxpayer ID, it risks returning the address of an innocent person with the same name or similar address to the person who ICE is targeting. The proposed system also assumes that the data provided by DHS is accurate and that each targeted individual is the subject of a valid criminal investigation. But the IRS has no way to independently check whether or not these requests are justified.

The new software system also doesn't limit the amount of data that can be transferred or how often DHS. can request it. As ProPublica notes, the system could easily be expanded to acquire all the information the IRS holds on certain taxpayers. And by shifting a single parameter, the program can return significantly more information than just a person's home address. It could also give ICE agents access to data on things like your family relationships or other sensitive information. What people might not realize is that illegal immigrants actually do pay taxes. For decades, the American government has encouraged everyone who makes an income in the U.S. to pay pay taxes regardless of their immigration status. And there's always been this implicit promise like ProPublica notes that their information would be protected and not used against them. But now that

exact data is going to be used to locate and deport non-citizens. As always, when it comes to bad tech policy and civil liberties violations, the primary lawmaker fighting back against all of this is Senator Ron Wyden. He's the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Finance, which oversees the IRS, and he told ProPublica that the system being built was ripe for abuse. Quote, it would allow an outside agency unprecedented access to IRS records for reasons that have nothing to do with tax administration, opening the door to endless fishing expeditions, he said. And while the IRS is the latest example of government data harvesting efforts, it's far from the only example. Just last week, the AP reported that ICE has secured

unprecedented direct access to a federal database containing sensitive medical data on tens of millions Americans under the guise of locating immigrants. ICE will now be able to access data that provides law enforcement with the names, addresses, birth dates, ethnic and racial information, as well as the social security numbers for all people enrolled in Medicaid. This database also contains sensitive medical information, like detailed records about diagnoses and procedures people are having. In addition to personal home addresses and phone numbers, ICE will also be able to access

things like people's IP addresses, banking information. and more. Medicaid provides state and federally funded health care to the country's poorest and most vulnerable people. It's available to some non-citizens, but those people are primarily refugees, asylum seekers, survivors of human trafficking, or permanent residents. Some states do provide Medicaid coverage for children and pregnant people regardless of their immigration status, but making their medical data available to ICE will only disincentivize the most needy people from seeking medical treatment. Meanwhile, Doge and the DHS are also working to build a national citizenship database. This database would link information from the Social Security Administration to the Department of Homeland Security, a sensibly for verifying citizenship for local elections. This rushed and likely shoddily built software could ultimately disenfranchise millions of voters and for the first time ever create one master citizenship database, which comes with a whole host of privacy concerns. All of these developments show a chilling expansion in the government's ability to monitor, track, and target anyone, not just undocumented

immigrants. Our civil liberties are being systematically dismantled, and all of these people who spent years claiming that we need to ban TikTok because of data privacy, which was always bullshit, by the way, are completely silent as the government builds a massive data surveillance machine. We desperately need data privacy protection and lawmakers who are willing to fight for our civil liberties. Because if this is what government surveillance looks like in 2025, a massive imagine what it could look like by 2030. Thanks for watching and don't forget to subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter, usermag.co.

That's usermag.com where I write about all of this stuff and more. You can watch full episodes of my free speech Friday series on my YouTube channel. And if you like my channel, give me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening. Also, special thanks to ProPublica reporters William Turton, Christopher Bing, and Abby Asher Shapiro for all the reporting on the IRS that was used in today's video. There are many lines in today's episode that are right from their story. And if you guys don't subscribe to ProPublica, it's worth it to support true independent journalism. Thanks again for watching and see you next week.