While President Donald Trump deploys federal agents to carry out mass expulsion plans at the start of his mandate, he has a huge amount of technology at his disposal to follow, categorize and monitor immigrants.
Immigration and customs application (ICE) and citizen and immigration services spent $ 7.8 billion for immigration technologies from 263 different companies since 2020, the New York Times reported this week. Technologies include biometric monitoring, such as facial recognition, vocal analysis and fingerprint digitization, monitoring location via software monitoring and ankle and rapid DNA test tools.
Agencies also have access to investigation tools that can search by e-mail, text messages and other files on locked phones, and they contract with data analysis companies Store and sort the massive amounts of data compiled on immigrants currently in the United States
Access to these technologies is not new in the Trump administration. Much of the expenses of these technological contracts began during the mandate of President Joe Biden, and many tools were designed for drug traffickers and other criminals, starting after the September 11 attacks.
Marina Shepelsky, an immigration lawyer based in New York, said four immigrant groups are targeted in Trump’s raids. Those who have criminal convictions will probably be the highest priority, she said, but those who have received an expulsion order by a judge or those who have entered the country under the Biden administration are also Targets.
Anyone who is in the United States without status, which means without visa, or on an expired visa, is in danger, said Shepelsky.
The Ministry of Internal Security describes the different uses of AI Technology he has at his disposal, but Shepelsky said she is probably looking at combing via immigration files and crossed data from visa applications, criminal records and social media platforms.
Federal agents also probably use predictive modeling of AI in various ways, she said, as evaluating the probability of overcoming visas or engaging in criminal behavior. The ministry collects known information, such as immigration status, a history of conformity, the status of caregiver and the criminal history, and attributes to each person something called a “hurricane score”. The score, classified 1-5, is calculated by an automatic learning algorithm designed to determine if a person can flee immigration procedures.
Shepelsky warns systematic biases that AI algorithms can produce; “(They) may unjustly target certain demographic data, increasing the risks of racial profiling,” she said.
Peter Salib, assistant professor by law at the University of Houston Law Center said that he also thought that AI can rationalize a lot on the immigration process. If your goal is to target immigrants who have committed serious crimes, as is the policy under the administrations of Biden and Obama, he said, the AI can probably help you do this.
“AI can really help you achieve your goal and impose less costs on people who don’t need to be swept away in the application,” said Salib.
But access to these technologies and these intentions are different things, said Salib. Although the Biden administration has access to these tools in recent years, it has not planned the wide increase expulsion efforts that we see Trump execute now.
“Technology exists in the world, and therefore even if you are afraid of a kind of slippery slope to use it badly, it is not really clear that you can get off this slope simply by refusing to use it when You are in the administration that has the “good” objectives, “said Salib.
Although there are ethical concerns with AI, it is possible to improve parts of border security and citizenship processes with technology, said Shepelsky. He helped process visa requests faster and detect fraudulent documents, as well as high -demand high -demand employment visas.
Technology will probably continue to play a role in Trump’s immigration policies and in other parts of his early administration program, said Salib.
“I think this is the world we are living in now,” said Salib. “And the choice we have more concerned with policy that technology is available for people who wish to apply policies.”