Dahni K. Tsuboi is chief executive officer of Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California, a legal aid and civil rights organization.
For immigrant communities across California, data privacy is a matter of safety and survival. It is the first line of defense against federal immigration surveillance and overreach. Information shared to gain employment, access healthcare, obtain legal assistance or simply navigate daily life can reveal deeply sensitive details such as immigration status, family relationships or daily movements.
These concerns have intensified as the Trump administration increasingly relies on commercially available data for enforcement. The threats are particularly acute for the Asian American community. Nationwide, nearly 6 in 10 Asian Americans are foreign-born, and an estimated 1 in 7 Asian immigrants are undocumented. In California, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests of Asian individuals increased by more than 1,000% in 2025.
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The fear of data misuse extends across all immigrants and victims of abuse. Any personal information can become a tool of continued abuse if it falls into the wrong hands. Thankfully, legislation by state Assemblymember Chris Ward (D-San Diego) would help address these fears by prohibiting the sharing and selling of sensitive personal information – including immigration status, precise geolocation, sexual orientation, health information and religious beliefs – with third parties. Assembly Bill 1542 awaits final votes in the state Senate and Assembly before heading to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk.
At Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California, we see these concerns firsthand.
The people seeking our legal aid services are often fleeing abuse or other circumstances where their immigration status puts them at risk. For them, confidentiality is essential. Yet several high-profile cases of the federal government using smartphone data to track, locate and arrest individuals have left some people afraid to seek help at all. They may fear that records of visits to an immigration attorney’s office could expose their whereabouts to immigration authorities or an abuser attempting to locate them.
Paul Thornton
When members of our community are too afraid to seek critical support because they do not trust that their personal information is secure, our privacy failures become barriers to safety and justice.
Often without knowing it, many of us surrender information every time we carry a smartphone. That information is then packaged and repurposed into digital profiles that lay bare the most sensitive parts of our lives – and it’s available to anyone willing to pay for the information. That’s why ICE and other agencies do not need their own surveillance infrastructure. All of it is for sale.
Brokers aggregate and sell the commercial data Californians generate daily, and immigration enforcement is just another customer. And they’re not just doing this for targeted advertising: Consider Mobilewalla, a data broker that tracked the locations of people who attended protests following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
Mona Field
ICE operates in the same marketplace. The agency uses commercially purchased data to identify and track people flagged, sometimes incorrectly, as undocumented through contracts with companies like Palantir and Penlink. That dragnet has ensnared U.S. citizens and triggered wrongful detentions, spreading fear through communities across the state.
California must now ask: Should the state keep enabling a marketplace built on our most sensitive data? AB 1542 begins to answer it by banning the sale and sharing of sensitive personal information, including immigration status and health records.
Opponents claim this would compromise public safety by restricting law enforcement agencies from sharing information during emergencies, but "sharing" here covers only data disclosed for behavioral advertising. Emergency communications would be untouched. That opponents have centered this objection reveals what’s actually at stake for them: not public safety, but the uninterrupted ability to target ads.
Sarah B. Hunter
Unfortunately, the data collected for lucrative hyper-targeted marketing can also make people the targets of federal immigration agencies. Data privacy isn’t just about strengthening consumer protections in an economy that increasingly commercializes our data – it’s also about ensuring personal safety, as immigrants already know.
State leaders use lofty rhetoric about protecting Californians from federal overreach, but their promises alone are not enough. AB 1542 is the action those promises require. This bill is not solely about immigration enforcement. It’s also about the basic freedom to move through the world without every step being recorded, sold and – especially for immigrants and other vulnerable populations – used against you.
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