ICE Is Snooping on Your Medical Bills
The immigration agency has reportedly gained access to a private database designed to fight insurance fraud.
The feds are vacuuming up a lot of data on Americans in the name of stopping illegal immigration. Their latest target? Your insurance data.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is now using data from the Insurance Services Office's ClaimSearch, a private industry service for detecting car and health insurance fraud, according to ICE documents obtained by the tech news site 404 Media on Wednesday. ClaimSearch includes 1.8 billion insurance claims and 58 million medical bills—along with the personal data attached to them, including addresses, tax identification numbers, and license plates.
ClaimSearch's public policy states that it grants full access to law enforcement agencies "investigating or prosecuting insurance-related crime, or developing background information about a specific individual or list of individuals who have been identified as persons of interest with regard to homeland security activity."
Verisk, the company that runs ClaimSearch, denied to 404 Media that ICE or the Department of Homeland Security is one of its clients. But the National Insurance Crime Bureau, which controls access to ClaimSearch, did not directly answer whether ICE has access. 404 Media speculated that ICE could have gained access through another government agency.
In March 2025, the Trump administration signed an executive order to tear down "information silos" between federal agencies, and in May, the IRS signed a data-sharing agreement with ICE. The administration has leaned heavily on surveillance contractor Palantir, which has a contract with ICE to facilitate "complete target analysis of known populations."
ICE has also been tapping into the nationwide network of license plate reading cameras by asking local law enforcement agencies to run searches for specific cars, 404 Media reported earlier this year. Some police departments insisted to 404 Media that the searches were conducted for ICE's Homeland Security Investigations branch, which handles organized crime and smuggling rather than immigration enforcement.
However, the ICE documents on ClaimSearch specifically said that the data was going to Enforcement and Removal Operations, the branch that handles the detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants.
The immigration cops didn't just start building their mass surveillance dragnets this year. In 2021, at the start of the Biden administration, The Washington Post reported that ICE was buying utility company records. While Customs and Border Protection (CBP) insisted in a 2018 report that it buys "only anonymized data" from third-party brokers, it has used commercial cell phone data to track and arrest specific people.
The newly passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which pumps $170 billion into immigration and border enforcement efforts, will make ICE the largest law enforcement agency in U.S. history. Thanks to the Trump administration's directives on information sharing, though, the data collected by ICE won't necessarily stay with ICE.
There's a whole, largely unknown ecosystem of commercial data brokers that sell information on citizens—often purchased through a confusing web of third-party services—to governments. And although there have been pushes from Congress and the Supreme Court to institute better privacy safeguards, the federal bureaucracy seems to be moving in the opposite direction.
