Investments in high-tech tools in recent years give federal immigration officials enormous power to track and categorize immigrants, experts say. (Getty Images)
As President Donald Trump deploys federal agents to carry out plans of mass deportations at the start of his term, he has a massive amount of technology at his disposal to track, categorize and surveil immigrants.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Citizen and Immigration Services have spent $7.8 billion on immigration technologies from 263 different companies since 2020, the New York Times reported this week. The technologies include biometric tracking, such as facial recognition, voice analyzing, and fingerprint scanning, location tracking via software and ankle monitoring and rapid DNA testing tools.
The agencies also have access to investigative tools that can search through emails, text messages and other files on locked phones, and they contract with data analytics firms to store and sort through massive amounts of data compiled on immigrants currently in the U.S.
The access to these technologies is not new to the Trump administration. Much of the spending on these tech contracts began during President Joe Biden’s term, and many tools were designed for investigations of drug traffickers and other criminals, beginning after the 9/11 attacks.
Marina Shepelsky, an immigration attorney based in New York, said four groups of immigrants are being targeted in Trump’s raids. Those with criminal convictions will likely be the highest priority, she said, but those who have been issued a deportation order by a judge or those who entered the country under the Biden administration are also targets.
Anyone who is in the U.S. unlawfully without status, meaning without a visa, or on an expired visa, is at risk, Shepelsky said.
The Department of Homeland Security outlines the various uses of the AI technology that it has at its disposal, but Shepelsky said she sees it likely being focused on combing through immigration records, and cross-referencing data from visa applications, criminal records and social media platforms.
Federal agents are also likely using predictive AI modeling in various ways, she said, like assessing the likelihood of overstaying visas or engaging in criminal behavior. The department collects known information, like immigration status, compliance history, caregiver status and criminal history, and assigns each person something called a “hurricane score.” The score, ranked 1-5, is calculated by a machine learning algorithm designed to determine if a person may flee immigration proceedings.
Shepelsky warns of the systematic biases AI algorithms can produce; “[they] may unfairly target certain demographics, increasing risks of racial profiling,” she said.
Peter Salib, an assistant professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center said he, too, believes AI can streamline a lot about the immigration process. If your goal is to target immigrants who have committed serious crimes, as was policy under the Biden and Obama administrations, he said, AI can probably help you do that well.
“AI can really help you accomplish your goal and impose fewer costs on the people who don’t need to be swept up in enforcement,” Salib said.
But access to these technologies and intent are different things, Salib said. While the Biden administration had access to these tools in recent years, it was not planning the wide-reaching deportation efforts we’re seeing Trump execute now.
“The technology exists out in the world, and so even if you’re scared of a kind of slippery slope into using it poorly, it’s not really clear that you can get off that slope just by declining to use it when you are in the administration that has the ‘good’ goals,” Salib said.
Though there are ethical concerns with AI, there’s potential to improve parts of border security and citizenship processes with the technology, Shepelsky said. It’s helped process visa applications faster and detect fraudulent documents, as well as streamlined high-demand employment visas.
Technology will likely continue to play a role in Trump’s immigration policies and in other parts of his early administration agenda, Salib said.
“I think it’s the world we live in now,” Salib said. “And the choice we have is about policy more than about what technology is available to the people who want to enforce policies.”