By: Politico
Date: July 18, 2022
The Trump administration’s immigration enforcers used mobile location data to track people’s movements on a larger scale than previously known, according to documents that raise new questions about federal agencies’ efforts to get around restrictions on warrantless searches.
The data, harvested from apps on hundreds of millions of phones, allowed the Department of Homeland Security to obtain data on more than 336,000 location data points across North America, the documents show. Those data points may reference only a small portion of the information that CBP has obtained.
These data points came from all over the continent, including in major cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Denver, Toronto and Mexico City. This location data use continued into the Biden administration, as Customs and Border Protection renewed a contract for $20,000 that ended in September 2021.