Following ICE subpoena, Chicago city clerk suspending online municipal ID program portal

Yahoo

21 hours ago

The Chicago city clerk is suspending the online application portal to a municipal ID program recently subpoenaed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the latest defense from local officials grappling with the threat of mass deportations under Republican President Donald Trump.
Clerk Anna Valencia announced Friday that her office would take the CityKey online portal offline Friday night, a week after the Tribune reported that ICE subpoenaed her office for the personal information of applicants to the program that is often used by noncitizens.
The clerk said that while CityKey's in-person events — which do not leave behind a written trail that identifies applicants — will not be affected, her office decided to halt online applications after other elected officials and community groups expressed concern.
'We did hear, 'Let's pause the online platform temporarily as we take a pulse and evaluate what's happening,'' Valencia said during an interview with the Tribune. 'We're going to assess what's happening daily and where the climate is, and if we feel we are in a different place, we can easily turn the online platform back on, but we are not going anywhere.'
The April 17 subpoena from ICE, which Mayor Brandon Johnson's administration has vowed to resist, represents a new frontier in the president's immigration crackdown that has placed Chicago squarely in his crosshairs. But for those familiar with CityKey, news of the federal government's unprecedented hunt for applicants' personal information raised the question of why there were records to subpoena in the first place.
When the municipal ID launched in 2017 under Valencia and then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel, they promised the city would not keep identifying documents because the cards would be printed on the spot at in-person events. Years later, crushed by the surging demand during the Venezuelan migrant crisis, Valencia's office debuted a website in December 2024 to sign up for appointments or apply for the card online.
Because of local public records law, the city began retaining documents for those online applicants, more than 2,700 as of this month.
Valencia said the city's data retention policy does not allow her office to destroy those documents, which are hosted by third-party software vendor Omicron Technology Solutions but under the control of her office. Asked to offer specific advice for past applicants who may be concerned, she pivoted to reassuring the public that their personal information remains safe.
'Listen, I've always been honest and transparent and led with integrity,' Valencia said. 'I know there's a lot of fear out there, so I want to be very clear that we're going to fight giving over any data to the federal government. … No data was given over to ICE, period, zero, for the CityKey.'
But that's the exact scenario that Forest Gregg, a data privacy advocate, warned the city against when it sought community and expert input on how to safely implement CityKey before its debut.
'I was shocked,' Gregg said. 'This seemed to me to be the utmost carelessness. This is the kind of information that you really don't want to depend upon only legal protections to protect. … I really feel it's a betrayal of the people who the clerk asked to trust them.'
Asked about whether she has any regrets, Valencia sought to instead pin the blame on Trump during her 45-minute sit-down.
'I want to go back to the original problem, that if this Trump administration wasn't overreaching for private people's data, this would not even be a conversation,' Valencia said. 'This is Trump doing a witch hunt and intentionally trying to instill fear in people so that they can overtake our democracy.'
During the city's last round of budget hearings in November, Valencia applauded Chicago for becoming 'the first municipality to give residents the ability to apply for an ID online and receive it through the mail.'
By then, Trump had been reelected, unnerving many in the liberal city over his promise to enact the largest mass deportation operation in American history.
For one former City Hall official who helped create CityKey, the revelation that the clerk's office still went ahead with an online portal left them 'stunned.'
'I can't believe it, and I know others that were part of the project, I talked to them, they are enraged by this as well,' the ex-staffer said. 'The creation of the online portal was a very specific thing that clearly collided with the original design and the intent that introduced risks.'
The former member of the Emanuel administration, who requested anonymity to speak freely about internal government deliberations, said the CityKey team back then agreed the program must be 'subpoena-proof,' meaning no digital record could be created given local laws surrounding public records. The city consulted with Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois to gauge these concerns.
Now, the city is awaiting ICE's next steps after refusing to comply with its subpoena calling on the city to 'provide a copy of the application and all supporting documents for all individuals who applied for a CityKey identification card between April 17, 2022, and April 17, 2025, and used any foreign document as proof of identity, including but not limited to: consular identification card, foreign driver's license, or foreign passport.'
The Tribune also obtained an ICE subpoena sent to Chicago's Department of Streets and Sanitation on March 21 that sought payroll records for current and recent employees as part of a worker eligibility audit. Law Department spokesperson Kristen Cabanban confirmed to the Tribune on Friday that the city turned over 'some documents' in response to that subpoena but declined to answer follow-up questions on what those records were.
The CityKey subpoena was the first of its kind seeking the program's documents and represents an escalation by the federal government to seize entire batches of private information. And Chicago is not alone.
Under the second Trump administration, Colorado too was subpoenaed by federal immigration agents for the personal information of sponsors of immigrant children. Washtenaw County, Michigan, officials were hit with a U.S. Department of Homeland Security subpoena for employment eligibility documents.
The White House has also been pressuring the Internal Revenue Service to share data with ICE to identify immigrants for deportations. Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Trump in allowing his Department of Government Efficiency to access personal data stored in Social Security systems.
About 145,800 CityKeys have been issued since its 2017 inception, per the clerk's office. For the period of time in the ICE subpoena — April 17, 2022, to April 17, 2025 — 87,100 individuals had applied for CityKey.
However, only 2,700 of them used the online portal that launched in December, the only CityKey applicants for whom identifying records exist today.
Though the idea behind Chicago's CityKey originally came from immigrant advocates, the program was billed to be for all Chicagoans, including the LGBTQ, homeless and formerly incarcerated populations, so as not to serve as a scarlet letter for noncitizens without legal status. And critically, the 2017 ordinance establishing CityKey noted, 'The Clerk shall review, but not collect, documents provided by an Applicant.'
In May 2024, the City Council signed off on an amendment from Valencia that added, 'Information provided by Applicants utilizing the online platform to obtain a City of Chicago ID will be stored.'
Because the ICE summons is only an administrative subpoena, the city does not have to comply. Should the federal government seek a court order, the city can move to quash the subpoena, after which it is in the hands of a federal judge. The decision could be appealed to higher courts.
Johnson's Corporation Counsel Mary Richardson-Lowry asserted in a Tuesday news conference that 'with respect to CityKey, we don't believe such an obligation is there' to produce records.
'We respectfully declined within the bounds of the law, given the privacy issues and specifically the exposure of groups like domestic violence victims,' Richardson-Lowry told reporters. 'Should they move toward a court setting, we will respond in kind.'
State privacy laws do specifically address the privacy of domestic violence victims.
Ron Safer, a former federal prosecutor, successfully represented the city in its lawsuit against the first Trump administration for withholding federal funds because of Chicago's sanctuary city ordinance. He thinks that law applies here too.
First established by Mayor Harold Washington 40 years ago and strengthened by city officials during Trump's first term, Chicago's sanctuary city policy bans local law enforcement and city officials from cooperating with federal immigration agents unless they have a criminal warrant. The state has a similar sanctuary law, known as the Illinois TRUST Act.
Safer said any potential litigation over the ICE subpoena could entail a constitutional turf war between those local and federal laws.
'It's ironic that this plays out because almost all of the recent jurisprudence would be 'conservative' forces who are resisting federal attempts to usurp state rights,' Safer said. 'These are complex doctrines that we haven't thought of for hundreds of years, because the federal government has never launched an attack on the cities like they have under this administration.'
In her interview, Valencia defended her rollout of CityKey by pointing to disclaimers on the online portal about the document retention policy. The website warned users of the following: 'By using the CityKey online platform, you are agreeing to allow the Office of the City Clerk to keep a record of all the information you submit during your application process.'
However, data privacy and immigrant advocates who spoke with the Tribune said it's not reasonable for applicants — especially those unfamiliar with U.S. subpoena laws and immigration enforcement — to have understood what they were consenting to when they uploaded their private documents.
Daniel Loftus, CEO of the immigrant advocacy nonprofit PODER, said there were 'lines down the block' during past CityKey events hosted by his organization.
'The response has been tremendous, and that obviously tells you that the need to have a government-issued ID,' Loftus said.
With respect to the online portal, Loftus said, 'I don't think people understood the risk. And so that, to me, would have to be crystal clear if the city clerk's office were to continue with CityKey and the online portal.'
But Gregg, the data privacy advocate, thinks the clerk's office should shut down the entire program because 'they've blown it.'
'I don't think anyone in good conscience could advise someone who needs to have the information to be protected to trust the clerk,' Gregg said. 'Because those records now exist, and it's very hard to put that genie back in the bottle.'