When New Jerseyans share personal identifiable information with any state or government agency, they do so with the trust that their information will be kept confidential.
Yet under current law, public entities routinely sell information to data aggregators, with limited protections on confidentiality. As NJPP Senior Policy Analyst Marleina Ubel has detailed in the November 2024 report Combating Surveillance and Protecting Privacy: Why New Jersey Needs the Immigrant Trust Act, federal immigration enforcement uses a dragnet of personal information that includes motor vehicle records such as scanned driver’s license photos and the license plate and vehicle data of nearly 3 in 4 adults.
When combined with available data sources such as credit records and geolocation data from phone providers, federal law enforcement can identify and track the locations of almost all Americans with a shocking degree of accuracy, without needing a warrant and in secret.
Current loopholes in state privacy laws make it far too easy for federal immigration enforcement to access sensitive data from schools, libraries, doctors’ offices, and government agencies. And with the new frontier of license plate readers, facial recognition, and extensive surveillance provided by cameras operated by government agencies or third-parties on their behalf, the amount of data that can be used to enact a vast dragnet has only increased.
As federal agencies have shredded existing privacy laws to hand over sensitive tax and Medicaid enrollment data to immigration enforcement, now is the time for states to step up to protect the sensitive data that residents share with the state.
New Jersey’s governments, health care providers, and schools should not be unwitting accomplices to vast data collection to supercharge federal immigration enforcement. Passing A6309 is an important step to keeping all New Jerseyans’ data safe and secure.
