Surveillance tech advances by Biden could aid in Trump’s promised crackdown on immigration

President-elect Donald Trump will return to power next year with a range of technological tools at his disposal that could help him deliver on his campaign promise. cracking down on immigration — including surveillance and artificial intelligence technology that the Biden administration is already using to make critical decisions in tracking, detaining and ultimately deporting immigrants who lack permanent legal status.

Although immigration officials have used the technology for years, an October letter from the Department of Homeland Security obtained exclusively by The Associated Press details how these tools — some powered by AI — help make life-changing decisions for immigrants, including ask if they should do that. are held or guarded.

For example, one algorithm ranks immigrants with a “hurricane score,” ranging from 1 to 5, to assess whether someone will “abscond” from the organization’s surveillance.

The letter, sent by DHS Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer Eric Hysen to the immigrant rights group Just Futures Law, revealed that the score calculates the potential risk that an immigrant — with an open case — will fail to report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials . The algorithm depends on several factors, he said, including an immigrant’s number of violations and length of time in the program, and whether the person has a travel document. Hysen wrote that ICE agents consider the score, among other things, when making decisions about an immigrant’s case.

“The Hurricane Score does not make decisions about detention, deportation or surveillance; instead, it is used to inform human decision-making,” Hysen wrote.

Also included in the government’s toolkit is a mobile app called SmartLINK that uses facial recognition and can track an immigrant’s specific location.

Nearly 200,000 people without legal status who are in removal proceedings are enrolled in the Alternatives to Detention program, which allows certain immigrants to live in the U.S. while their immigration cases are pending.

In return, SmartLINK and GPS trackers used by ICE keep a close eye on them and their movements. The phone application uses facial recognition technology and geolocation data, which has previously been used to find and arrest those using the app.

Just Futures Law wrote to Hysen earlier this year, questioning the fairness of using an algorithm to assess whether someone is a flight risk and raising concerns about the amount of data SmartLINK collects. Such AI systems, which score or screen people, are widely used but remain largely unregulated, even though some systems have been found to discriminate on the basis of race, gender or other protected characteristics.

DHS said in an email that it is committed to ensuring that the use of AI is transparent and safeguards privacy and civil rights, while avoiding bias. The agency said it is working to implement the Biden administration requirements for using AIbut Hysen said in his letter that safety officials may waive these requirements for certain applications. Trump has done so publicly promised to repeal Biden’s AI policies when he returns to the White House in January.

“DHS uses AI to assist our personnel in their work, but DHS does not use the results of AI systems as the sole basis for law enforcement actions or denials of benefits,” a DHS spokesperson told the AP.

Trump has not revealed how he plans to carry out his promised deportation of an estimated 11 million people living in the country illegally. Although he has proposed invoking wartime powers and military involvement, the plan would face major logistical challenges — such as where to hold prisoners and how to find people scattered across the country — that AI-powered monitoring tools could be possible. address.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump, did not answer questions about how they plan to use the DHS technology, but said in a statement that “President Trump will muster every federal and state force necessary to conduct the largest deportation operation in the U.S. to initiate history.

More than a hundred civil society groups sent a letter Friday urging the Office of Management and Budget to require DHS to adhere to the Biden administration’s guidelines. OMB did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Just Futures Law Executive Director Paromita Shah said that if immigrants are identified as a flight risk, they are more likely to remain in detention, “limiting their ability to prepare a defense in their case in immigration court , which is hard enough. .”

SmartLINK, part of the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, is operated by BI Inc., a subsidiary of the private prison company The GEO Group. The GEO Group also contracts with ICE to manage detention centers.

ICE has been tight-lipped about how it uses SmartLINK’s location feature to track and arrest immigrants. Yet public records show that during Trump’s first term in 2018, employees of BI Inc. of Manassas, Virginia, provided the GPS locations of immigrants to federal authorities, who subsequently arrested more than 40 people.

In a report last year to address privacy issues and concerns, DHS said the mobile app includes security features that “prohibit access to information on the participant’s mobile device, except for location data points when the app is open.”

But the report notes that there remains a risk that data collected from people “could be misused for unauthorized ongoing monitoring.”

Such information could also be stored in other ICE and DHS databases and used for other DHS mission purposes, the report said.

During investor calls earlier this month, private prison companies were clear about the opportunities ahead.

GEO Group Executive Chairman George Christopher Zoley said he expects the new Trump administration “will take a much more aggressive approach to border security and domestic enforcement and will seek additional funding from Congress to achieve these goals .”

“In GEO’s ISAP program, we can scale from the current 182,500 participants to several hundred thousand or even millions of participants,” said Zoley.

That same day, the head of another private prison company told investors he would be watching closely to see how the new administration might change immigrant monitoring programs.

“It is an opportunity for multiple suppliers to engage ICE in the future program and think about creative and innovative solutions to not only achieve better results, but also scale the program where necessary,” said Damon Hininger, CEO of the private prison company CoreCivic Inc. . said during an earnings call.

GEO did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement, CoreCivic said it has “played a valued but limited role in the U.S. immigration system” for more than four decades for both Democrats and Republicans.