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. We did not anticipate that this day would come within three years. Our hope was that the findings of our research would be useful for the communities organizing against immigration policing and digital surveillance, and would help to provoke policy change. Today, as masked federal agents abduct students off the street in broad daylight, and the President scoffs at an order from the Supreme Court to facilitate the return of a man illegally deported to El Salvador, and his administration threatens to suspend habeas corpus, to hope to be saved by “policy change” would be to indulge in soothing nonsense. It would be vain to hope that the exposure of wrongdoing or the revelation of brutality could rouse the current Congress on behalf of the people. There is, in some sense, nothing left to be revealed or exposed. Or to be more precise, the revelation and exposure of new particulars will not tell us anything more about the nature of the political situation through which we are living. The struggle now is not to uncover the right information, but to rightly understand the meaning of the information we already have, and to face that meaning together.
We are re-releasing American Dragnet today because, while we do not have updated findings, the current context requires an updated understanding of our original findings.
In 2022 we found:
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ICE had scanned the driver’s license photos of 1 in 3 adults.
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ICE had access to the driver’s license data of 3 in 4 adults.
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ICE was tracking the movements of drivers in cities home to 3 in 4 adults.
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ICE could locate 3 in 4 adults through their utility records.
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ICE built its surveillance dragnet by tapping data from private companies and state and local bureaucracies.
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ICE spent approximately $2.8 billion between 2008 and 2021 on new surveillance, data collection and data-sharing programs.
Given the Trump administration’s transgression of privacy and civil rights protections, we can be confident that the percentage of people whose information is captured in the driver records and utility records to which ICE has access is now much higher. In recent months we have also learned that DHS is seeking access to data from nearly every level and category of government bureaucracy. In addition to the agency’s well publicized demand for access to IRS data, for example, DHS has also attempted to access an extensive unemployment database in New Mexico and records from an elementary school in Tennessee. The data brokers and data mining companies, whose profiteering has always been parasitic upon carceral programs of the state, are newly unleashed. In April, ICE awarded Palantir a $30 million contract under which the company will provide the government with the ability to track people’s movements with “near real-time visibility.” In 2024, shortly before the presidential election, DHS entered into a $2 million contract with the Israeli corporation, Paragon, which sells spyware that allows the user to access information stored on or transmitted through cellular devices, and has been used by governments to target journalists and activists in violation of international human rights law.
Reading American Dragnet now in the glare of the current historical moment, two important insights emerge:
First, it is a mistake to think about what the Trump administration is doing now as “immigration enforcement.” Trump is using immigration powers as the vehicle for the activities of his militarized police force, which is currently composed of ICE and CBP agents, as well as local police who have been officially or unofficially deputized to do the bidding of the federal government. The reason he is invoking immigration powers is not because he is engaged in anything that could reasonably be described as the enforcement of immigration law, but because immigration powers are a weapon he can wield broadly and violently without having to navigate obstacles in the form of transparency, accountability or oversight mechanisms. The data dragnet the report describes, which almost nobody can now escape, is not a byproduct of DHS’s immigrant surveillance programs, it’s the clear purpose of those programs.
Second, resisting autocracy in the digital age will require a conception of privacy as more than an individual right. The sheer amount of data about everyone to which the government has access, combined with the algorithmic products that corporations are building to make datafied surveillance more efficient, means that any new piece of information about one person quickly generates information about many people, or about whole categories of people. As Trump maneuvers every database he can find for the explicit purpose of political persecution and intimidation, the danger is not only that individual people will be targeted, but that our ability to act together as a people will be destroyed. Movements cannot grow without a space of minimum safety in which to gather, deliberate and organize. In order to create those spaces, we will need to find a way to reclaim privacy not primarily as a right to be left alone, but as a right to come together in pursuit of our common good.