Washington, DC — Two must-read New York Times columns, “ICE’s New Surveillance State Isn’t Tracking Only Immigrants” by David Wallace-Wells and “ICE is Watching You,” by Tressie McMillan Cottom, offer deeply disturbing reminders that every facet of the federal government is being deployed to support President Trump and Stephen Miller’s anti-immigrant mass deportation obsessions, including using Big Brother tactics that threaten the privacy and rights of all Americans.
According to Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice:
“The surveillance state is here, violating your privacy and your rights and led by our own federal government. Most Americans have seen and been horrified by watching President Trump and Stephen Miller’s mass deportation crusade in action in Minneapolis and cities across the country. More ominous and less understood is how every part of the federal government is becoming an arm of their anti-immigrant assault, including actions that infringe on the rights and privacy of American citizens through mass surveillance and ‘Big Brother’ intrusion. From using facial recognition technology and social media monitoring to target citizens expressing their first amendment rights to launching investigations into American businesses that disagree with Trump and Miller, this administration is actively dismantling our constitutional rights under the guise of immigration enforcement.”
Among the reminders of the growing surveillance state on behalf of mass deportation:
- David Wallace-Wells in his New York Times column, “ICE’s New Surveillance State Isn’t Tracking Only Immigrants,” noting, “[O]ne feature of President Trump’s crackdown on immigration does seem beamed in from a seamless law-enforcement future: the suddenly ubiquitous use of facial recognition technology to identify not just those whom federal agents suspect are in the country illegally but also those who are protesting, interrupting or simply documenting the nationwide nativist dragnet. …’ It’s totally unprecedented, what they’re doing,’ David Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute told me. ‘They feel like they can point their phone at anyone who walks by, at any car, at any driver and instantly find out everything they want to know about that person.’ …giving indiscriminate checkpoint-style power to every agent in the field, Bier said, is “a total reshaping of law enforcement in the United States.” Instead of investigating a crime by identifying a suspect and then pursuing information about him or her, officers instead begin with someone they want to treat as a criminal and then use the technology to find a justification.”
- Tressie McMillan Cottom in her New York Times column, “ICE is Watching You,” noting: “If combined with the facial recognition and social media monitoring commonly deployed by the Department of Homeland Security, those reams of data would turbocharge ICE’s terror campaign in the short term and destroy American civil liberties in the long term. Should this surveillance infrastructure live up to its technical potential, it would be a leviathan that our 250-year-old Constitution almost certainly cannot
- The Marshall Project, “‘We Know Where You Live.’ Protesters Say ICE Agents Retaliate With Threats, Investigations,” noting: “Hours after the co-owner of a St. Paul toy store criticized the federal government’s immigration crackdown in the Twin Cities during a national television interview, workers there said a pair of federal agents suddenly showed up to announce an audit of employee records. In another case, protesters observing Immigration and Customs Enforcement movement said officers called them by name, and even led them back to their own home. To the protesters, the incident felt like a bold attempt to silence dissent.”
- Politico, “Second judge blocks IRS from sharing taxpayer information with ICE,” noting, “The Trump administration was dealt another setback Thursday in its effort to use taxpayer information to track down undocumented immigrants, as a second federal judge ordered the IRS to stop sharing residential addresses with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
- New York Times, “How ICE already knows who Minneapolis protesters are,” noting, “Agents use facial recognition, social media monitoring and other tech tools not only to identify undocumented immigrants but also to track protesters, current and former officials said.”
The new coverage join earlier reminders, including:
