By Carolyn Bick
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Since President Donald Trump took office, the federal government has noticeably expanded its use of surveillance tools and artificial intelligence to target immigrants, allegedly in the name of fighting crime and fraud.
But, as panelists at American Community Media discussed at a Sept. 5 media briefing, the ways in which the federal government has been deploying these tools jeopardizes not just the privacy and security of both documented and undocumented immigrants, but also the privacy and security of permanent residents and U.S. citizens.
These tools include department of motor vehicle databases, facial recognition, mobile phone tracking, and data broker contracts.
“This digital dragnet has the potential to place every American under unprecedented scrutiny,” panelist and journalist Pilar Marrero said. “By compiling and cross-linking personal information, the state increases the risk of political targeting, identity theft, and massive data breaches. What starts as surveillance of immigrants can quickly become surveillance of all, eroding the privacy rights of every resident.”
The Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology also discovered last year that the federal government has also been collecting immigrants’ DNA for a massive criminal database, despite the fact that most of these immigrants have not been accused of or charged with any crimes. These immigrants also include children, 230 of whom were under the age of 13. More than 30,000 were 14–17 years old.
The center is suing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) over these findings, published in a report called Raiding the Genome: How the United States Government Is Abusing Its Immigration Powers to Amass DNA for Future Policing.
Emerald Tse, an associate at the center, explained that the federal government collects DNA under immigration powers, and uses that DNA to create profiles in a federal policing database called CODIS. Law enforcement can search this database to identify people who have committed crimes in the past, she said, “but we also found that the federal government has defended DNA collection from immigrants as a way to predict who might commit crimes in the future.”
The center updated the report in July. In addition to its original findings, Tse said, the center found that DHS was adding more profiles to the federal criminal policing database at a rate much faster than we originally anticipated, that profiles were added regardless of whether a person committed a crime or had been charged with a crime, and that they had been added regardless of the person’s age.”
“So these massive surveillance powers, whether they be our personal information or genetic information or biometric information, this power is now in the hands of an increasingly authoritarian government,” Tse said. “And we’ve seen the government already use those powers for not only immigration enforcement, but also for political repression.”
Tse pointed to the arrests and detentions of activists and union leaders, as well as the arrests of elected officials who have attempted to check the administration’s abuses of power.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi recently threatened Gov. Bob Ferguson and other Washington officials with arrest and criminal charges, labeling Washington as a “so-called sanctuary jurisdiction,” and said that any officials who use “their official position to obstruct federal immigration enforcement efforts … may be subject to criminal charges.”
Ferguson said that the letter was devoid of any legal merit. The letter also ignored states’ Constitutional rights.
Tse also touched on another of the center’s reports, called American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century, which highlights how the Trump administration is using everything from utility bills to tracking drivers to tapping data from private companies and state and local agencies. The center published American Dragnet in 2022, and re-released it in May.
“When we published American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century in 2022, we understood that the surveillance infrastructure our report describes could one day be deployed by an authoritarian executive to coerce and control the U.S. population at scale,” the report’s new forward reads. “We did not anticipate that this day would come within three years.”
Tse said that private technology companies stand to benefit the most from the federal government’s expansion of surveillance technology, at the expense of both the public’s money and freedoms.
“In American Dragnet, we found that between 2008 and 2021, ICE’s annual surveillance technology spending ballooned from $400 million to $700 million per year,” Tse said. “And since then, DHS Secretary [Kristi] Noem called for more government partnerships with private companies, and we have continued to see these private companies be awarded multi-million dollar contracts with the federal government for these types of technologies.”
Tse said that, while she is not aware of it happening, it is possible for the federal government to profile someone who reports a crime.
“That is certainly a fear amongst people within that population—that people who are subject to surveillance are afraid of engaging with any institution that keeps records,” Tse said. “So, for particularly sensitive communities and those communities who rely on institutions for essential services, they are less likely to report, less likely to seek help when they need it.”
Panelist Nicole Alvarez, a senior policy analyst for technology policy at the Center for American Progress, said that part of the danger in building these databases lies in the fact that the longer such databases and technologies are in use, the harder they are to get rid of, because they become “embedded in government operations.”
“Newer records will only continue to be added, often without preserving that information, that important information about their origin, their legal protections, or permissible uses,” Alvarez said. “And over time, additional systems may even be designed to interact with or depend on that centralized database, making it even more difficult to dismantle and increasing the risk that it becomes a permanent fixture of government infrastructure.”
Alvarez also highlighted that data collection has already been used and will increasingly be used against journalists.
Fellow panelist and Senior Staff Attorney Sophia Cope of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said that Customs and Border Protection’s policies have a “lukewarm nod to the idea that some information, such as confidential source information or journalist unpublished work product, might be protected.”
“So, as a practical matter,” Cope continued, “if you are crossing a border and you get pulled in secondary inspection, you can tell them you’re a journalist and that sometimes has encouraged them to sort of pull back on what they’re trying to do.”
Cope said that the Freedom of the Press Foundation recently published a checklist for journalists to secure their devices for travel across the U.S. border, which EFF republished.
Cope also advised that people regularly update their devices’ software, when prompted, because of so-called “zero click” spyware infiltrations. This means that, if a person’s device is not updated, and they open messages on an encrypted service like WhatsApp or Signal, it is accessible by this spyware, because the message is decrypted so that the receiver can read it.
“It’s basically a gap in the software where there’s a flaw in the software … and ‘zero-click’ means that you don’t have to click on a link or anything like that. It’s just sort of sent to your device and is installed,” Cope explained.
“There’s a sort of cat-and-mouse game between the spyware companies and the device companies,” she continued. “The number one piece of advice on this that I can give is that if there is a software update for your device, install it immediately, because most of the time, it’s a security update to patch a vulnerability.”