Maru Mora-Villalpando had been living in the United States for 21 years when a letter arrived at her door with a deportation notice.
It was 11 months into Donald Trump’s presidency, and Mora-Villalpando thought she had taken all the necessary steps to keep her address hidden from authorities.
But she did not realise that immigration officials could track her whereabouts using basic information she had assumed was private, such as her car registration or utility bills. “I didn’t know all this data was being packaged up and given to authorities,” said Mora-Villalpando, a community organiser who works with immigrant and undocumented communities in Seattle, Washington.
“People would see ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents outside their homes, and we didn’t know how they would find us – well now we know.”
The Trump campaign and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.
High-tech enterprise
Immigration enforcement is increasingly a high-tech enterprise.
Authorities can track migrants using data brokers that create detailed profiles of immigrants based on thousands of data points, as well as other state-of-the-art surveillance tools including facial recognition and licence plate readers.
Algorithms can help decide an immigrant’s fate on a range of issues, from whether they should wear an ankle monitor to whether an asylum case is flagged as suspicious.
Authorities are also using ever more artificial intelligence, which campaigners worry could generate target lists for deportation or automatically reject asylum applicants en masse.
With Trump leading in the polls, many organisations that work with immigrant communities worry these tools could be used to speedily target then deport some of the more than 11 million undocumented people who are estimated to live in the US.
“There’s a huge tech infrastructure ready to do just that,” said Jacinta Gonzalez, field director of Mijente, a grassroots organisation that works on immigration issues.
In a memo released in 2023, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration enforcement, said it would “not use AI technology to enable improper systemic, indiscriminate, or large-scale monitoring, surveillance or tracking of individuals”.
Undocumented immigrants always have risked deportation – even those who came as children or who are near-lifelong US residents.
Despite more than two decades of trying, Congress has never been able to pass a law that would normalise their status.
Instead, authorities have exercised discretion and chosen to steer clear of deporting certain segments of the population, such as migrants brought in by parents before they had turned two, a cohort known as “The Dreamers”.
The number of immigrants deported from the interior of the country has fluctuated wildly over the last decade, ranging from under 60,000 to well over 200,000.
“Mass deportation is easier said than done,” said Muzaffar Chisti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute think tank.
There are multiple steps to removing an undocumented person, and he doubts Trump could muster the manpower, money or logistics to deport the millions he has promised to evict.
“Everyone may be under surveillance but to turn it into removal is not easy,” he said. “But making people look over their shoulder – creating an atmosphere of fear, he can do that.”
No tech for ICE
When Trump held power between 2017-2021, he took a hard line on immigration, trying to block Muslims, separating children from family at the border and instructing ICE agents to deport some immigrants without a hearing before a judge.
Pro-immigration groups began to focus on how technology undergirded such strict policies, forming a coalition in 2018 called “No Tech for ICE” which pressured private firms to cut ties with immigration enforcement agencies.
“We realised a lot of these decisions were being automated and the data they were collecting was vast,” said Gonzalez.
Immigration officials need no warrant to conduct much of the surveillance they undertake – and authorities increasingly vacuum up all sorts of data that can help locate illegal immigrants.
A 2022 report from Georgetown University’s Center for Privacy and Technology found ICE had access to three in four people’s driver’s licence.
ICE had already used face recognition technology to search through a third of them, the report found, and could automatically pinpoint the address of 74% of adults by tapping into the sort of data found on any utility bill.
ICE spent an estimated $2.8 billion on data collection and data-sharing initiatives between 2008 and 2021, according to the report.
“If you look at how much they are spending – they think surveillance is the future of immigration enforcement,” said Emily Tucker, head of the Georgetown Center for Privacy and Technology.
In 2021, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced the “4th Amendment is Not for Sale Act”, which would severely limit the data that immigration authorities can buy on the open market.
But the law has stalled in the Senate.
The current administration has also escalated deportations – while offering relief to certain classes of undocumented immigrants, such as those married to US citizens.
‘Ready to go’
Julie Mao, a lawyer with Just Futures Law, an immigration legal group, worries about the prospect of a second Trump term.
She points to the potential for abuse of what is already a rich US pool of data brokers, surveillance tools, AI and smart algorithms – especially given Trump's promise to create a new "deportation force" and round up millions of immigrants.
“With their surveillance tools and the network of data brokers – they could easily populate long lists of current locations of immigrants they want to deport,” she said. “They are ready to go.”
Last month, Mao co-authored a report on AI-powered tools used by the Department of Homeland Security, including tools to review millions of asylum applications to detect fraud, and scan social media to flag immigrants’ posts.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.
Among undocumented immigrants, there’s "a really strong sense of fear and uncertainty about what it could look like for a second term," said Antonio Gutierrez, co-founder of the Chicago-based group Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD).
“We are even more concerned than we were in 2016 – partially just because of all the new tools.”
A lawsuit filed by OCAD and Just Futures Law against data-broker LexisNexis for improperly sharing immigrants’ data with the government was recently dismissed by a judge in Illinois.
LexisNexis “supports the responsible use of data in accordance with governing statutes, regulations and industry best practices”, company spokesman Paul Eckloff told Context in an emailed statement.
Documents obtained by immigrant rights groups found that immigration authorities had searched the database over a million times in just a seven-month period.
Thomson Reuters – the main donor of the Thomson Reuters Foundation which funds Context – has provided similar services for immigration authorities. Thomson Reuters says its products are “not designed for use for mass illegal immigration inquiries or for deporting non-criminal undocumented persons and non-citizens”.
Gutierrez said OCAD is gearing up for a possible deportation wave to hit Chicago, any crackdown hypercharged by technology.
Undocumented parents will be forced to ready instructions for their children’s care just in case they are suddenly taken into custody under Trump, mirroring their preparations ahead of the 2016 election, Gutierrez said.
“Everyone is scared.”
This article first appeared on Context, powered by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
