Trump surveillance worries immigration, rights groups

Civil liberties and immigration rights groups worry Donald Trump’s incoming administration could use powerful law enforcement surveillance and big data technology to press ahead with some key policies, risking infringing on privacy rights.
Republican Trump has repeatedly said he would “militarise” certain law enforcement activities, which could involve using the military for domestic law enforcement, though he has not provided any specifics.
The Thomson Reuters Foundation reported in July that a victorious Trump could use surveillance systems and artificial intelligence to supercharge his plan to carry out a mass deportation of illegal immigrants.
When the former president returns to the White House in January, he will have across-the-board powers backed by a Republican-controlled Senate and Congress, and a conservative majority in the Supreme Court.
Against this backdrop, experts worry that an emboldened and more powerful and organised second Trump administration could exploit advances in technology and surveillance to forge ahead with policies ranging from immigration to policing.
“He is likely to further empower law enforcement to invest in and deploy surveillance tools, with little regard for civil liberties concerns,” said Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at the American University in Washington, DC.
The Trump campaign did not respond to the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s questions about its views on surveillance technology.
“The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver,” said Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump-Vance Transition team.
The concerns about surveillance powers are particularly acute among immigration rights groups, which worry that a Trump administration would be able to harness data brokers, facial recognition, and other tools to create lists of immigrants it would want to deport.
Data brokers are companies that track and collect personal data and, in the United States, there are few regulations restricting what they can sell to law enforcement.
J D Vance, Trump’s running mate, has said the Trump administration could aim to deport around 1mn people a year. By comparison, the Biden administration deported around 150,000 illegal immigrants in 2023, the vast majority of which were new arrivals at the border.
“These technologies will be exploited, and probably in the worst possible way,” said Paromita Shah, the executive director of Just Futures Law, a legal immigration advocacy group.
In recent years, Shah and other immigrant rights advocate groups have asked regulators to restrict immigration authorities’ access to big data tools, and filed lawsuits alleging data brokers who share such information violate consumers’ privacy. The efforts have had little results so far.
After his victory, Trump told NBC News he would prioritise the deportation plan, adding there was “no price tag” on the operation.
It is unclear how many undocumented migrants Trump aims to deport. The US Department of Homeland Security estimated there were 11 million immigrants without legal status in 2022.
Immigration experts, however, have pointed to some bureaucratic and legal hurdles, such as insufficient immigration judges and tight budgets for hiring agents to conduct the operations.
Efforts by Trump’s first administration to deport long-standing immigrants from the interior of the country were at times hampered by a lack of co-operation between local law enforcement agencies and immigration authorities, according to a study from the libertarian Cato Institute.
Another concern is that Trump could exploit advances in the police’s surveillance capacity to implement his vision of “restoring law and order and public safety in America”.
There has been an explosion in surveillance tools in US police department in recent years, while law enforcement’s access to commercial databases has also increased, allowing them to track people without a warrant.
The number of local police departments with “real time crime centres” — central hubs where surveillance from cameras, license plate readers and other inputs flow — has almost doubled over the last four years, according to data collected by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group.
Over 90% of large police departments in the United States currently have access to automatic license plate readers, up from around 66% in 2016, data from the Department of Justice showed.
Meanwhile, the data broker industry — where law enforcement can buy location information and other personal data without a warrant — has grown four-fold since 2020 to over $411bn, according to market research firm MMR.
Experts worry about the implication of this for privacy but also for racial justice in policing, which has come under close scrutiny since the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.
“I don’t think that (The Trump administration) is going to be taking the time to look deeply into the racial justice or privacy arms of these new technologies,” Ferguson told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“In fact, I think they are going to open the commercial floodgates to allow...new policing technology companies into the market.”
Civil liberties and immigration rights groups say they are looking for ways to make it more difficult for the incoming Trump administration to harness these powers.
The ACLU, the largest US national public interest law firm, is calling on local lawmakers to build “firewalls” that could limit Trump’s access to local policing resources.
Immigration groups say they are planning to press the Department of Homeland Security to abandon some technology tools before it hands over power to the Trump administration in January, including winding down deals between immigration authorities and data brokers.
During the last Trump administration, the ACLU and other civil liberties groups documented how local authorities would often share those license plate reading data with federal immigration authorities to support deportation operations.
The day after Trump’s victory, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued a public notice asking companies to submit plans to support expanded programmes for tracking migrants, including with ankle monitors, GPS tracking, and biometric check-in technology, the technology publication Wired reported.
After Trump’s victory, the ACLU created a petition asking Americans to write to Congress, calling on lawmakers to pass laws that would restrict the federal government’s ability to purchase Americans data from data brokers.
“If Donald Trump’s administration gains unfettered access to our personal data, they could use it to go after communities of colour, political opponents, people seeking reproductive or gender-affirming healthcare, and anyone who disagrees with their policies,” the group wrote.
Matt Cagle, a lawyer with the ACLU in California, said he also fears a Trump administration could exploit data collected by local police departments from tools like automatic license plate readers, or facial recognition systems.
“When localities are collecting tons of information about their residents it becomes ripe for exploitation by any administration to try and target and locate all sorts of people,” he said.
Earlier this year, a federal law that would have limited the ability of law enforcement to buy and use privately collected data — such as location information collected by apps — passed the US House of Representatives, but stalled in the Senate.
“Commercial data is definitely a free for all,” Shah said.
Police departments have also made the most of the Biden administration’s decision to give them access to Covid relief funding for “public safety” purposes.
Many have used this to buy sophisticated surveillance systems — including social media monitoring systems, expanded surveillance camera systems, and license-plate readers, according to an analysis by non-profit Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).
Policing groups say these tools make crime fighting more efficient — but civil libertarians have warned about dragnet surveillance, which collects data on everyone and not only those suspected of crimes.
Trump’s language during the campaign — including his promise to deploy the military against the “radical left” or “enemy within” and pledge to persecute his political enemies — raises broader concerns about what the administration could do with these kinds of powerful surveillance tools, Ferguson said.
“They might start with undocumented individuals,” he said. “But then you can turn the same power on any disfavoured group.” – Thomson Reuters Foundation