ILAP Testimony In Support of LD 1822: An Act to Enact the Maine Online Data Privacy Act

The Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, or ILAP, respectfully submits the following testimony in support of LD 1822.

I. About ILAP:

ILAP is Maine’s only statewide immigration legal services organization. As such, ILAP has a unique bird’s eye view over the impact of federal immigration policy on Maine’s residents, communities, workforce, and our state as a whole.

II. Strong Online Data Privacy Protections Are Needed To Safeguard The Rights And Safety of Maine’s Immigrant Residents:

The current federal administration is engaged in a mass deportation agenda, which has already taken tremendous tolls on Maine’s immigrant communities, workforce, and future. Daily arrests quotas are at the center of that agenda and the majority of people being arrested by immigration officers in Maine (and elsewhere) are people who are in lawful immigration processes and who have never committed a crime.¹

One of the administration’s tactics for mass deportation and reaching daily quotas is seeking access to various data sources to identify and target people. This has included seeking access to data from the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, child support cases, social media, and much more.²

Immigrant communities in Maine use the internet to seek immigration legal assistance (including from ILAP), Know Your Rights information, English as a Second Language resources, and much more that could readily identify them as noncitizens. Without strong privacy protections, these searches can become part of detailed, individual profiles that could be sold to and used by the federal government without a warrant.

Given the administration’s quotas, indiscriminate nature of enforcement, and clear tactics of seeking to access data for its agenda, strong internet service provider privacy laws are a necessary safeguard, limiting the ability of ISPs to collect, use, and sell sensitive data.

III. LD 1822 Includes Key Data Minimization Standards That Would Protect Maine’s Immigrant Residents In This High Stakes Environment:

LD 1822 features a key protection for immigrant communities: data minimization. This provision requires companies to collect, use, and retain only the data that is reasonably necessary to provide the good or service a person has requested. Without this safeguard, companies often collect far more information than needed, including browsing histories, location data, and detailed profiles.

For Maine’s immigrant communities who are using the internet to navigate their immigration cases and access other services and resources, digital profiles hold details about their lives that could easily be used to target them.

The stakes could not be higher. Maine residents in ICE detention report sub-human conditions to their ILAP attorneys including having very little food, being in overcrowded cells, being very cold, not having access to medication, not having access to showers, and more. More than 40 people have died in U.S. detention centers since January 2025.³ People arrested by ICE are at risk of fast-track deportation to potentially life-threatening circumstances, and families are separated and permanently destabilized.

 In addition to actual enforcement, the fear of enforcement is having a serious impact on our entire state and collective future. Immigrant residents have withdrawn from public life, are afraid to go to work, send children to school, and more. Laws like LD 1822 that help protect people in the movements of daily life are key to protecting all of Maine from the widespread impacts of federal immigration enforcement policy. By limiting unnecessary data collection from the start, data minimization reduces the amount of sensitive information that companies can collect, store, or eventually sell to third parties.

IV. Conclusion:

In conclusion, ILAP strongly supports LD 1822. LD 1822 will help protect Maine’s immigrant residents from additional surveillance and it will reduce the risk of sensitive online information about their lives being weaponized against them.

¹5% of People Detained By ICE Have Violent Convictions, 73% No Convictions, Cato Institute (Nov. 24, 2025), https://www.cato.org/blog/5-ice-detainees-have-violent-convictions-73-no-convictions#:~:text=Of%20people%20booked%20into%20ICE,violent%20or%20property%20criminal%20conviction; Lawyers say Border Patrol in Maine is arresting people who are in lawful immigration processes, Maine Public (May 8, 2025), https://www.mainepublic.org/courts-and-crime/2025-05-08/lawyers-say-border-patrol-in-maine-is-arresting-people-who-are-in-lawful-immigration-processes.

²DHS Seeks Access to Massive Employment, Salary and Family Database Legally Restricted to Use in Child Support Cases, ProPublica (March 11, 2026), https://www.propublica.org/article/dhs-trump-child-support-federal-parent-locator-service-immigration; How tech powers immigration enforcement, Brookings (Oct. 6, 2025), https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-tech-powers-immigration-enforcement/; Immigration, DOGE, and Data Privacy, Center for Democracy and Technology (May 2025), https://civilrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Immigration-DOGE-and-Data-Privacy.pdf. 

³Afghan asylum-seeker dies in ICE custody, US advocacy group says, Reuters (March 15, 2026), https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/afghan-asylum-seeker-dies-ice-custody-us-advocacy-group-says-2026-03-15/.