US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are using an obscure legal tool to demand data from elementary schools, news organizations, and abortion clinics in ways that, some experts say, may be illegal.

While these administrative subpoenas, known as 1509 custom summonses, are meant to be used only in criminal investigations about illegal imports or unpaid customs duties, WIRED found that the agency has deployed them to seek records that seemingly have little or nothing to do with customs violations, according to legal experts and several recipients of the 1509 summonses.

Mehrotra, D. (2023, April 3). ICE is grabbing data from schools and abortion clinics. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/ice-1509-custom-summons/

Emily Tucker is the executive director at the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law and one of the authors of “American Dragnet,” a 2022 report about ICE surveillance. In an interview, Tucker not only expressed concern about how 1509 summonses have been used to target journalists, but about how it fits into ICE’s broader surveillance apparatus. “I can’t help but feel that the federal government is using ICE as a data vacuum,” she says. “They are looking for any way to access and integrate all kinds of data into massive databases.”