The U.S. under President Donald Trump is stepping up the use of surveillance systems and artificial intelligence (AI) to track and arrest immigrants, raising concerns about the risks of accuracy and privacy, and almost everyone may face the danger of falling into repression.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other immigration control agencies are using a suite of AI tools such as facial recognition scanners in public areas, and robot dogs patrolling the southern border for human movements – as part of the crackdown on alleged illegal immigrants.
Many of the AI tools used by immigration agents have been used for years and are the legacy of the previous government, said Saira Hussain, an attorney for digital rights advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation.
But now, these tools have a scope of “about who” [they are] Hussein said, “People who are targeted will have access to the data collected by these tools.
Pumped surveillance Dragnet also includes services operated by private contractors such as Babel Street, a social media account for trawling to collect personal information.
After collecting this information, agencies such as the DHS and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) used it to track the location of immigrants, map their genealogy and justify the warrants and deportation decisions.
An example of the expansion is the government’s new “Capture and Revocation” program, which was launched in March at Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
According to the Axios news website, it uses AI to monitor public speeches by foreign nationals, especially student visa holders, to find “people who seem to support Hamas or other designated terrorist organizations.”
According to Rubio, anyone captured by the program is at risk of immediate loss of visas, with more than 300 foreign nationals, including those with student and visitor visas, being revoked under the initiative.
“If they are taking activities that conflict with our national interests, we will revoke our visas,” Rubio said in a press conference on March 28.
Digital rights advocates point out that AI tools tend to raise false “illusions” – information that looks real but has been fabricated – which makes them dangerous to use when precise conditions such as immigration enforcement.
Paromita Shah, executive director of immigration rights firm Just Futures Law, said the arrests of immigrants using these tools “has raised a lot of concerns about civil rights violations and abuses”.
Rights advocates say there have been many cases of inaccurate AI data since Trump took office in January.
Among them are Jonathan Guerrero, a U.S. citizen who was arrested in Philadelphia by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officer (ICE) agents, and Jensy Machado, a U.S. citizen who was detained at gunpoint while driving to work in Virginia. Everyone was released.
The executive order signed by Trump in January proposed that it could return a “fast DNA test,” a process used to verify connections to immigrant families abandoned in 2023 due to privacy and accuracy issues.
“Technology starts at the boundary, goes into the interior, and is not proven to be accurate,” Hussein said.
“I don’t think accuracy is the goal of this administration. They really like the huge news that “We were able to knock down XX people”.'”
Independent technical analyst Tekendra Parmar agreed, saying accuracy is not a priority for the Trump administration to care more about meeting deportation goals.
“The violation of this technology … allows the current government to develop a rubber stamp deportation policy under the guise of artificial intelligence,” Parma said.
Neither DHS nor ICE responded to requests for comment.
The surveillance system is targeted not only for immigrants, but also for residents of all citizens, the researchers said.
In 2021, Georgetown University Law Center researchers found that ICE has access to three-quarters of U.S. driver licensing data and can locate the same numbers through its public utility records.
“These data-intensive tools aggregate all these data points and make connections,” said Emerald Tse, vice president of the Georgetown Law Center’s Privacy and Technology Center. “It may imply that people in your family, neighbors, workplaces, are actually every aspect of your life.”
Experts say the aggregated data is pumped into the algorithm to help determine who should detain ice, whether to release a person in custody or determine the terms of their electronic surveillance.
Immigration institutions are also growing. Another executive order from Trump encourages the use of the so-called 287(g) agreement, which allows the Department of Homeland Security to act as a federal immigration official on behalf of local law enforcement.
This enables local authorities as well as the AI tools used by ICE and all private data collected by these tools. This means that thousands of immigration agents are processing private data and searching for the people involved in the data.
“That’s where I see the ramp,” Hussein said. “The Fed has their technology, and locals have their technology. There’s a lot of sharing that information and any data that the technology can collect.”
publishing – April 19, 2025 09:25 AM IST
