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.
A WIRED analysis of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) subpoena tracking database, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, found that agents issued custom summons more than 170,000 times from the beginning of 2016 through mid-August 2022. The primary recipients of 1509s include telecommunications companies, major tech firms, money transfer services, airlines, and even utility companies. But it’s the edge cases that have drawn the most concern among legal experts,
The outlier cases include custom summonses that sought records from a youth soccer league in Texas; surveillance video from a major abortion provider in Illinois; student records from an elementary school in Georgia; health records from a major state university’s student health services; data from three boards of elections or election departments; and data from a Lutheran organization that provides refugees with humanitarian and housing support.
In at least two instances, agents at ICE used the custom summons to pressure news organizations to reveal information about their sources.
All of this is done without judicial oversight.
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The 1509 customs summons is an administrative subpoena explicitly and exclusively meant for use in investigations of illegal imports or unpaid customs duties under a law known as Title 19 US Code 1509. Its goal is to provide agencies like ICE with a way to obtain business records from companies without having to go to a judge for a warrant.
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Without access to the underlying subpoenas ICE issued in each use of a 1509, it’s difficult to know exactly why companies in the database were issued customs summonses. However, nearly everyone we spoke to was concerned about the types of organizations that received these summonses. Our investigation found that ICE issued scores of customs summonses to hospitals and hundreds to elementary schools, high schools, and universities. “It’s disturbing,” Mao says. “I really can’t imagine how a student or a health record could possibly be relevant to a permissible customs investigation under the law.”
To figure out if these summonses were issued for customs investigations, we contacted 30 organizations that received them. Most did not respond, and many who did refused to speak on the record for fear of retaliation.
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In March last year, US senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, revealed that ICE had been using 1509 customs summonses to obtain millions of money transfer records, which were added to a database that was shared with hundreds of law enforcement agencies across the country. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), it was one of the largest government surveillance programs in recent memory.
Immediately after Wyden’s investigation, the number of customs summons issued by ICE fell from 3,683 in March 2022 to 1,650 by the end of August, according to the records WIRED obtained.
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Source: ICE Is Grabbing Data From Schools and Abortion Clinics | WIRED
Robin Edgar
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