You Opened a Credit Card. ICE Now Knows Where You Live

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ICE<br>You Opened a Credit Card. ICE Now Knows Where You Live

Joseph Cox

Jul 22, 2026<br>at 9:14 AM

Here's how your personal address travels from your credit card provider, through middlemen companies, and ends up with ICE.

Image: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, via Flickr.

When you open a new credit card, you necessarily give the credit card company your address. You probably expect that information to remain with your bank.<br>But when you open a new credit card or change your address on file, your address leaves your credit card provider, travels through a web of middlemen companies, and ends up with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which can then search, analyze, or pair that data with other pieces of information about your life without a warrant.<br>404 Media has mapped out this supply of data by reviewing U.S. government procurement records and internal documents from companies providing the information. It highlights the sometimes unexpected ways ICE is gaining access to peoples’ personal information as the agency continues to acquire and leverage all sorts of data.<br>The agency is buying information not just for immigration enforcement but to also investigate what the administration describes as ‘voter fraud.’ ICE officials have also repeatedly attempted to intimidate legal observers of ICE activity.<br>“No one signing up for a credit card thinks they're giving data brokers a thumbs-up to sell their personal information to ICE. Not only is it an outrageous violation of our privacy, it's impossible for Americans to opt out,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement.<br>Here’s how that data supply chain works:

You Open a Credit Card

Whenever you open a credit card, or update your personal information, the<br>credit card company provides your data to credit bureaus.

Credit Header Data

This is the personal data included at the top of your credit report. While the<br>credit report itself has stronger legal protections, the credit header data does<br>not.

Full Name<br>SSN<br>Phone Number<br>Address<br>Email address

Credit Bureaus

These companies are tasked with tracking peoples' credit. Experian and Equifax are<br>mentioned in the documents 404 Media obtained. TransUnion is another credit<br>bureau, but it has its own data selling product.

CLEAR

The credit bureaus provide the credit header data to Thomson Reuters, which<br>incorporates it into CLEAR. CLEAR is the company's investigative data product. It<br>brings together all sorts of data from different sources so customers can locate<br>individuals. Thomson Reuters sells access to CLEAR to law enforcement agencies.

ICE

ICE buys access to CLEAR and is able to query its data without a warrant. CLEAR is<br>also integrated with tools that ICE uses to find which neighborhoods to raid,<br>including ELITE, a system worked on by Palantir. ELITE gives ICE a "confidence<br>score" of a person's current address.

Laura Rivera, an attorney at Just Futures Law, told 404 Media “Most people are shocked to learn that anytime they open a credit card or phone account, their home address and other personal information is exposed to anyone willing to pay for it on the data broker market. Anytime we update our home address on these accounts, credit bureaus get the updates within 24 hours and share it broadly with other data brokers, thanks to legal loopholes that leave our personal information open to misuse and abuse.”<br>“The unregulated trade of credit header data hurts all of us, but it especially harms communities that are overpoliced, like Black and Brown people, immigrants, and people seeking reproductive care, enabling stalking, harassment, and even arrest and deportation. In our current climate, militarized immigration forces leverage credit header data to locate community members without a warrant. This is a blatant abuse of our personal data and lawmakers need to step in to rein it in,” she added.<br>💡<br>Do you work at ICE, CBP, or a company selling data or technology to those agencies? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

Credit header is the information at the top of your credit report, including your name, address, and contact information. You give this information to financial institutions, who in turn give it to the country’s credit bureaus that keep track of everyone’s credit.<br>Those bureaus then repurpose the data and sell it or provide it to other companies. In this case, that includes Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters is known for the Reuters news service, but it is also a data broker and sells an investigative tool called CLEAR to private and government clients.<br>404 Media...