Surveillance will be supercharged under the auspices of immigration enforcement.
Apr 30, 2025 Don Bell
In his first weeks in office, President Donald Trump issued several executive orders that intend to use federal law enforcement and military support to expand immigration enforcement operations within the United States, raising concerns about compelled data sharing and dramatically accelerating the ongoing mass deportation campaign. In the months since, the administration has begun destroying guardrails within government that protect personal data, aggregating data to support this effort.
In order to be successful, this deportation campaign will need to identify, track, and arrest millions of people.
Given that the overwhelming majority of immigrants come from Latin
America, Asia, the Caribbean, or Africa, most of those targeted will be
people of color. It will touch every corner of the country — because
immigrants are woven into our national fabric in every corner of the
county — and it will require authoritarian tactics like all-encompassing
surveillance.
Believing the administration line that mass deportation will only target people suspected of serious crimes is pure delusion. The administration is already targeting undocumented immigrants without criminal records, lawful permanent residents exercising First Amendment rights, and individuals potentially deemed guilty by association. It has shown it is unconcerned with due process — guaranteed to all under our Constitution — by detaining citizens, in one case for ten days, arresting a student on a visa without charge despite an internal memo claiming to have insufficient justification, and deporting American citizens.
We are learning the lesson in real time. When we start removing limits on what the government can do to anyone, we’re also removing limits on what the government can do to everyone. This is the stark reality of the expansive and invasive scale of surveillance in America when it is used under the auspices of immigration enforcement.
The Trump administration is seeking a staggering $175 billion more for immigration enforcement, with a Republican majority in Congress poised to approve billions for the Department of Homeland Security as a whole via the reconciliation process. For perspective, in Fiscal Year 2024, President Biden’s recommended budget for the entire Department of Homeland Security was approximately $103 billion.
This gargantuan influx of funding would supercharge the expansion of detention and surveillance, from the widespread use of artificial intelligence to the already widespread use of data brokers by ICE to exploit the data broker loophole, to the near-automated data sharing between federal agencies and state and local law enforcement via CODIS and other vast systems that collect biometric information.
Trump inherited a racist immigration system historically based in white supremacy, a system that already disproportionately harms Black, Latino, and Muslim immigrants. He campaigned on racist rhetoric around immigration and promises to conduct the largest mass deportation in American history. There is no reason to believe this increasingly lawless administration will not turn the tools of immigration surveillance against communities of color at an unprecedented scale.
Both political parties have contributed to building the means of constant surveillance, especially at the border. This has opened the door to mass surveillance across the country. While the parties have squabbled over immigration policy for decades, surveillance infrastructure that lines pockets, smothers dissent, and enables mass surveillance has continued to expand.
Bipartisan majorities have spent inordinate amounts of taxpayer dollars on detention and surveillance, with very little in comparison toward humanitarian protection and adjudication systems.
For both Congress and taxpayers, surveillance as a means of immigration enforcement is a financial boondoggle. There is no better example of the folly of virtually unchecked border surveillance spending than the mythical “smart wall.” For decades, the quest for an effective and all-encompassing series of surveillance towers has eluded policymakers, despite the billions spent on towers that use cameras, radar, night vision, and thermal vision.
“When we start removing limits on what the government can do to anyone, we’re also removing limits on what the government can do to everyone.”
A 2024 report by independent digital news organization VTDigger found that since 2021, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) built three surveillance towers along the northern border in New York and Vermont, adding to at least five towers already in the region. The power of these towers can vary, with some likely capable of detecting movement up to 7.5 miles away. In 2024, CBP confirmed it had installed approximately 300 new towers. According to one manufacturer, these towers “leverage the latest in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer vision.”
But despite the unspecified use and purpose of this technology by CBP, and questions of effectiveness and proportionality, more taxpayer money is spent with little transparency or public accountability. A 2020 RAND Corporation study found that the deployment of surveillance tower technology had uneven results, with no outsized boost in situational awareness, but probable increased crossing deterrence in the specific area. A “smart wall” is not just a waste of taxpayer dollars. There are real harms that come with these kinds of systems constantly monitoring the border. These towers contribute to the criminalization of migrants, leading to more deaths as people take more dangerous routes to avoid detection.
The vast surveillance technology deployed at the border leads to Border Patrol agents processing thousands of people, both migrants and U.S. citizens, many of whom are Black, Indigenous, and people of color. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports that DHS has deployed technology without specific policies in place to mitigate bias. It is vital to have policies in place, because the deployment of surveillance technology often ends up having a discriminatory impact.
Along the border, communities are subject to surveillance from a variety of surveillance technologies including drones. Fixed towers use cameras and radar to detect movement. Mobile surveillance towers and mobile surveillance platforms can be deployed at any time, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes in its report.
“Mass arrests cannot happen to scale without surveillance, including location tracking, racial profiling, and warrantless searches, electronic or otherwise.”
With Congress unable and unwilling to comprehensively address many of the important components that make up the immigration policy discourse, both sides of the aisle have found compromise in adding drastically more surveillance technology at the immediate border and in the broader border zone.
Families and individuals living at the border are effectively trapped in a virtual cage where their constitutional rights are violated on a daily basis. Their freedom of speech is curtailed by ICE monitoring social media and creating profiles of targets, warrantless searches are conducted on vehicles and travelers’ devices, and the ability to seek basic services, such as reproductive health care, is severely restricted by fear of detainment.
A regulation that defines the geographic scope of immigration enforcement powers, known as the 100-mile “border zone,” exposes most of the U.S. population to the increasingly unchecked power of “enforcement.” Despite the tenuousness of the legal authority involved, at the border and within the border zone, surveillance awaits individuals stopped by CBP, citizens and noncitizens alike, with a dehumanizing effect.
Mass arrests cannot happen to scale without surveillance, including location tracking, racial profiling, and warrantless searches, electronic or otherwise. These surveillance tools were being assembled even before President Trump took office, with the Biden administration establishing data broker contracts, developing e-carceration tools, and using artificial intelligence, even though this violated the administration’s own federal policies on the responsible use of artificial intelligence. The tools are being expanded under the Trump administration, with recent reporting revealing ICE paying tens of millions of dollars to contracting giant Palantir “to make modifications to a powerful ICE database and search tool to allow ‘complete target analysis of known populations’ and to update the tool’s targeting and enforcement priorities,” according to 404 Media.
With some states and municipalities entering agreements to support the president’s immigration agenda, data collection and sharing is an immediate and enormous concern. Among the Trump administration’s slew of executive orders, one establishes “Homeland Security Task Forces,” a federal-state partnership that may be similar to fusion centers, a network of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, first responders, and some private sector partners to collect, analyze, and share intelligence.
These networks have a checkered history of violating civil liberties. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice has issued a memorandum that threatens to prosecute state and local officials who do not comply with immigration demands. This is especially problematic given the kind of data collected at the border, particularly regarding sensitive information like DNA. Any time someone is detained by ICE or CBP, their DNA is likely collected. In a world where millions were arrested (and deported), millions of DNA samples could be collected.
Data like this can be used to expose associations and the intimate details of one’s life. The government’s collection of this information becomes even more concerning when we understand that agencies combine it with data they purchase. For example, one ICE contractor, ShadowDragon, scrapes data from more than 200 websites, including social media platforms, and provides it to the government.
“We are long past asking whether we have reached a constitutional crisis. It is here.”
There are several reasons this is particularly dangerous. First, DNA itself is highly sensitive information
that can identify familial connections, health conditions, and
genealogy that virtually no other type of data collected can. The
collection of location and app data, circumventing the Fourth Amendment
requirement for a warrant, means that the government could diagram an
incredibly detailed dossier on our lives, including political leanings,
personal associations, and intimate relationships.
Technology that targets unspecified people and communities, in addition to technology like facial recognition and automated license plate readers, increases the likelihood that most of this expansive scope of data collection will disproportionately harm Black, Indigenous, and people of color, and their communities.
The impact of these policies is not limited to the border. As we witness the demolishing of key guardrails and due process — a fundamental pillar of the rule of law — we must be reminded that surveillance, by its very nature, is overbroad. It is rarely confined to those it ostensibly targets. Simply put, mass deportation, as envisioned by this administration, cannot occur without mass intimidation, mass arrests, mass detention, and mass surveillance.
The dangers that accompany unaccountable and unchecked surveillance, including the data collection and sharing discussed in the first issue of this series, are all available to Trump as his administration seeks to conduct “immigration enforcement” on an unprecedented scale, legal justification be damned.
Combined, biometric data collection, data brokers, government data collection and sharing, and surveillance tools like facial recognition technology are being mobilized in the most dangerous way possible — in a moment of high tide for authoritarianism in America.
Living under this surveillance superstructure fundamentally changes the relationship between people and their government, as the government restricts liberty through constant monitoring and curtails rights rather than protecting them, under the guise of keeping us safe. We are long past asking whether we have reached a “constitutional crisis.” It is here, and the push of authoritarianism is being spearheaded under the auspices of immigration enforcement.