"How ICE uses social media to surveil and arrest immigrants," 22 December 2019 

Emails sent by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials expose how ICE used social media and information gleaned by for-profit data brokers to track down and arrest...  immigrant[s]... The emails are a rare glimpse into the ever-widening surveillance dragnet ICE uses to track down immigrants who are subject to possible deportation. In this case, ICE used Thomson Reuters’s controversial CLEAR database, part of a growing industry of commercial data brokers that contract with government agencies... “When you have someone with a fairly common name, Facebook makes it so much easier to be tracked,” said Sarah St.Vincent, [surveillance expert, Cornell Tech]... Reuters journalists have criticized the news media company’s $20 million contract with ICE for the use of CLEAR, saying that it “associates Reuters good name with government spying”... Julie Mao [deputy director of Just Futures Law]... [said] “There’s a whole windmill system where lives are being destroyed and people are pleading to these cases and defendants are not fighting them because federal defenders often feel like they can’t fight or challenge these cases. Often in these cases, there’s very minimal discovery.”... St.Vincent believes that the use of social media to create dossiers on people... serves to chill free expression for all people in the country, and not just the immigrants who might end up on ICE’s radar.