Metadata Exposes Authors of ICE’s ‘Mega’ Detention Center Plans

Comments and other data left on a PDF detailing Homeland Security's proposal to build “mega” detention and processing centers reveal the personnel involved in its creation.

A PDF that Department of Homeland Security officials provided to New Hampshire governor Kelly Ayotte’s office about a new effort to build “mega” detention and processing centers across the United States contains embedded comments and metadata identifying the people who worked on it.

The seemingly accidental exposure of the identities of DHS personnel who crafted Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s mega detention center plan lands amid widespread public pushback against the expansion of ICE detention centers and the department’s brutal immigration enforcement tactics.

Metadata in the document, which concerns ICE’s “Detention Reengineering Initiative” (DRI), lists as its author Jonathan Florentino, the director of ICE’s Newark, New Jersey Field Office of Enforcement and Removal Operations.

In a note embedded on ...