DHS/USCIS/PIA-087 Person Centric Identity Services Initiative

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a component of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is implementing Person Centric Identity Services (PCIS), an agency-wide effort to use enhanced business processes and emerging technologies to improve the reliability, accuracy, and completeness of biographic and biometric information across USCIS and other DHS immigration-related systems. The PCIS system compiles and aggregates this declared and obtained data through the use of algorithms and other sophisticated tools to establish an identity profile. The identity profile presents a single data set of consistent information about an individual’s identity history as essential support for adjudicative efficiency. There are limitations inherent in the current USCIS process of linking declared identity data solely to an individual’s assigned identifier, which can lead to incomplete or unreliable records. To improve completeness and reliability, USCIS is leveraging existing Information Technology (IT) systems and using PCIS to enhance identity management across USCIS and other DHS components that rely on immigration records to accomplish their missions. Organizing and managing identity data in a “person centric” manner requires aggregating biometric data, biographic information, immigration status, and immigration history into a single identity profile. These profiles are stored in the Identity Index. This means that an individual’s identity data is uniquely and accurately compiled so that each immigration benefit application, petition, or request, submitted to USCIS, each encounter with DHS1 through administrative immigration proceedings before the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ),2 and any visa information collected by the U.S. Department of State (DOS),3 is accurately associated with that individual. The initial version of PCIS was released into production in November 2021 and consisted of the Identity Population Pipeline, the Identity Index, Core Search, and User Interface basic functions. USCIS is publishing this Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) to describe the overall approach and vision for PCIS, as well as the personally identifiable information it plans to collect, use, maintain, and share. USCIS is developing PCIS in incremental phases and plans to update this PIA, as appropriate, to assess the privacy risks associated with future development efforts. December 2022

Associated SORN(s)

• DHS/USCIS/ICE/CBP-001 Alien File, Index, and National File Tracking System
• DHS/USCIS-007 Benefits Information System
• DHS/USCIS-010 Asylum Information Prescreening
• DHS/USCIS-017 Refugee Case Processing and Security Screening Information
• DHS/USCIS-018 Immigration Biometric and Background Check
• DHS/USCIS-005 Inter-Country Adoptions Security