The Trump administration has given Immigration and Customs Enforcement an absolutely staggering amount of money to hurt immigrants, and they’re not letting it go to waste.
Fortunately for ICE—but unfortunately for everyone else—tech companies are happily playing their part in building a truly dystopian society, one where you are always under the administration’s gaze.
According to 404 Media, ICE is using a facial recognition app to identify people, including citizens. Videos show ICE agents stopping random kids on bikes and people in cars and, if they don’t have or refuse to provide identification, they point their little cellphones at them to scan their faces.
The outlet wasn’t able to confirm which app ICE is using, but in the past they’ve used Mobile Fortify, which contains 200 million images as well as data from the State Department, Customs and Border Patrol, the FBI, and state records. A scan of someone’s face returns detailed information, including name, date of birth, nationality, and immigration status.
This sounds a lot like ICE now has the power to stop anyone they want for no particular reason and demand they submit to biometric screening to prove they’re a citizen. And if they aren’t, they’re presumably arrested.
You’ll note in this grand plan that there’s nothing about the probable cause ICE has to stop people with this high-tech version of “papers, please.” Indeed, it looks a lot like ICE simply profiles people and then subjects them to a search. Because that’s exactly what scanning your face after detaining you is: a search.
Because we have the Fourth Amendment, searches are supposed to be based on a reasonable, particularized suspicion. In other words, law enforcement officers are supposed to have a specific, reasonable concern about a specific person or persons before stopping them. Otherwise, officers could just stop anyone at any time for any reason.
Okay, well, we did have a Fourth Amendment. In September, the conservatives on the Supreme Court decided it’s A-OK to racially profile Hispanic people, considering things like the language they speak, their accent, where they're located, and what type of work they do.
The majority didn’t bother to explain their reasoning, but we can all thank Justice Brett Kavanaugh for his smug concurrence describing how this would work in practice.
“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U. S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go,” he wrote.
Do they, Brett? Do they?
What about the more than 170 citizens who have been detained by ICE? What about Maria Greeley, a U.S. citizen born in Illinois, who was stopped by federal agents and told that she didn’t look like she should have the last name Greeley, presumably because she’s Latina and a service worker? Those agents grabbed her, zip-tied her hands, and detained her based on their racist ideas about what kinds of last names immigrants should have.
And this is undoubtedly going to get worse as the Trump administration leverages its cozy relationships with big tech companies helmed by morally deficient billionaires.
ICE has partnered with Peter Thiel’s Palantir—to the tune of $30 million of your tax dollars— which is building “ImmigrationOS,” a cutesy little name for another tool of the surveillance state.
The justification for giving Palantir all of that money? It will streamline the identification of immigrants and make their removal more efficient. Also, without ImmigrationOS, ICE won’t be able to target MS-13 and Tren de Aragua gang members … because we’re still pretending this is about gang members.
The government also just gave a different facial recognition company, Clearview, a cool $10 million for access to its giant database to identify people who assault immigration agents. Given how much the Department of Homeland Security lies about these so-called assaults, this looks much more like it will be a tool for identifying, targeting, and arresting protesters.
While DHS wants to know everything about you, they’re not very interested in you knowing anything about them. Thanks again to the complete moral collapse of big tech billionaires, any attempts to report the location of ICE agents or even to simply host videos of ICE’s past misdeeds have been obligingly deleted from app stores.
And don’t sleep on how handy it is for ICE to get unfettered access to government databases. One of the big projects of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency was to break down the firewalls between government databases so the administration could better target and torment immigrants. DHS demanded that the Internal Revenue Service provide data for 7.3 million taxpayers in violation of privacy laws. And when the acting general counsel refused to do this, the administration shoved him out.
The government is pouring so much money into surveilling immigrants, but it’s really doing double duty. Trump is in the process of creating an ever-watchful government that has no guardrails.
And really, who is going to stop him?
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