U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been data mining personal information from other agencies to identify and locate deportable aliens. This has resulted in 14 lawsuits that allege violations of federal privacy protections.

These lawsuits remind me of the travel ban litigation during President Trump’s first term. Trump may have to fight them all the way to the Supreme Court, but he will prevail in the end, as he did in the travel ban case.

Even so, the lawsuits will succeed in hampering the implementation of Trump’s immigration policies, which may be their main objective.

Congress has given agencies that enforce our immigration laws the authority to use personal data from other agencies. The Privacy Act of 1974 and the Immigration and Nationality Act both explicitly authorize ICE to use such data for criminal and civil immigration enforcement purposes. Data mining makes it possible for ICE to use the vast amounts of data it gets from the other agencies.

Data mining entails sifting through massive amounts of data to find patterns that can be used with predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms. Machine learning algorithms provide the instructions computers use “to learn from data, make predictions, and improve their performance over time.”

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