Fighting Back Data Brokers

Around the country, ICE openly skirts sanctuary laws by buying access to public and commercial data from data brokers LexisNexis and Appriss. Since 2021, ICE has had a contract with LexisNexis for its Accurint Virtual Crime Center (AVCC) to access data on over 276 million people from more than 10,000 government and commercial sources. For the first time, in July 2021, ICE acknowledged that it was using data brokers like LexisNexis to get around sanctuary laws in localities such as Cook County. Specifically, through Appriss and LexisNexis, ICE receives real- time notifications about the incarceration status and release of people in local jails and prisons, which it can use to target people for detention and deportation efforts – even when local sanctuary policies prevent this same information from being shared with ICE.