DHS Can Buy Your Location Without a Warrant. That Is Not a Loophole, That Is the Point.

The paperwork smell never changes: stale coffee, copier toner, and the quiet confidence of a form that assumes it is allowed. America has perfected a modern ritual: we write rules that say the government needs a warrant, then we let it shop around for the same outcome.

Congress asks the DHS watchdog to investigate warrantless location-data purchases

Democratic lawmakers led by Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Adriano Espaillat are asking DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari to open a new investigation into whether DHS components, including ICE, have resumed buying Americans’ cell phone location data without warrants. Their March 3 request points to public contracting documents and reporting that ICE issued a no-bid contract in 2025 to Penlink that included licenses for a location tracking product called Webloc.

The lawmakers also say ICE has dodged oversight: they cite the cancelation of a scheduled briefing set for February 10, 2026, with no offer to reschedule.

On March 4, Sen. Alex Padilla and Sen. Adam Schiff amplified the request and stressed that this is not the first round of this fight. They point to a DHS inspector general report from late September 2023 concluding CBP, ICE, and the Secret Service did not adhere to privacy policies and failed to develop sufficient policies before procuring and using what DHS calls commercial telemetry data, including requirements tied to approved Privacy Impact Assessments. That audit also urged DHS to build department-wide rules instead of leaving each component to improvise.

The Orwell check: when “commercial telemetry data” becomes a constitutional eraser

“Commercial telemetry data” sounds like an engineering term, not a Fourth Amendment problem. That is the trick. Rename surveillance as procurement and you stop arguing about probable cause. You start arguing about vendor management.

If the government collects long-term location data directly, the warrant question gets loud. If it buys similar data from a broker, the warrant question gets shoved into a footnote, as if the Bill of Rights only activates when the invoice has a government logo.

The lawmakers stress why location data is uniquely sensitive: it can reveal visits linked to religion, politics, medical care, and personal associations. That is not paranoia. That is how maps work.

The Paine test and the liberty ledger

The Paine test: does this expand liberty, or concentrate power? Buying location data without a warrant concentrates power and moves a core decision from a courtroom to a purchasing office.

• Who gains? Agencies gain speed and scale. Contractors and data brokers gain revenue and dependency.
• Who loses? Anyone with a phone. And the pressure shows up first for people who protest, organize, worship in unpopular ways, seek sensitive health care, do journalism, or live in immigrant communities.

The tradeoff we keep mispricing, and the guardrails that should exist

This is not a clean safety-versus-privacy trade. It is a budget workaround that dodges the constitutional moment where the government persuades a neutral judge and creates a record.

Guardrails, as described in the letter and the oversight debate, look plain:

• Bar agencies by clear federal law from purchasing location data about Americans where a warrant would otherwise be required.
• Demand consequences if wrongdoing is found, not just another report filed into the national paper shredder.
• Require transparent accounting: what products are bought, what data sources they rely on, how queries are approved, what minimization rules exist, retention periods, and how often employees are audited.
• Push courts to treat purchased data like compelled data when it functions the same way.

We do not have to choose between enforcing the law and living in a tracked society. We have to decide whether warrants are still a guardrail, or just a nostalgic prop in a civics textbook.