AI meets ICE

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In 2016, Donald Trump promised to secure the border with a physical wall. In his second term as president, the infrastructure is digital, and it doesn't stop at the border.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security's deportation arm, saw its 2025 budget triple to $28.7 billion, a sum that would rank the agency as the 14th highest-funded military in the world, right between Ukraine and Israel. Much of it is going toward surveillance technology — tools to crack phones, monitor social media, and track movements.

And they aren't alone. Agencies at every level of government are buying AI-powered surveillance tools. Civil liberties groups warn the result will be the most comprehensive domestic monitoring system in American history. The reality is that these tools increasingly watch everyone, and not always accurately.

Automated Panopticon

The federal surveillance stack is expanding fast.

ICE is deploying a Palantir $PLTR tool called ELITE that uses AI to pull addresses from Medicaid and other government databases, populating a map of potential deportation targets. Each pin comes with a dossier and a "confidence score" on whether the person still lives there. The agency uses it to identify neighborhoods to raid. The tool doesn't distinguish between immigrants and citizens — it sweeps up anyone in the databases it queries.

For identification, agents carry an app called Mobile Fortify that runs facial recognition against a database of millions of photos. The agency has told lawmakers the app provides a "definitive" determination of someone's immigration status and should be trusted over a birth certificate. 

But when authorities used it on a detained woman during an Oregon raid last year, it returned two different incorrect names. There has already been at least one report of a U.S. citizen being told he could be deported based on the app's biometric results.

ICE is also building out social media surveillance, with plans to spend up to $50 million on a 24/7 monitoring operation. Citizen data will get swept up here too.

Border Patrol has its own apparatus. The agency has quietly strung a nationwide network of automated license plate readers across highways from the southern border to Illinois and Michigan. The agency also taps into similar systems run by the Drug Enforcement Administration and private companies.

Federal operatives monitor this data for movement patterns they consider suspicious, then coordinate with local police to pull over targeted drivers using minor traffic violations as pretexts. 

The agency is building "patterns of life" about people to detect when they deviate from normal routines, according to the Associated Press. Once stopped, drivers face aggressive questioning, searches, and often civil asset forfeiture, in which police seize cash or vehicles without proving wrongdoing.

The rules aren't keeping up

Some cities and civil liberties groups are pushing back. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is representing labor unions in a lawsuit to stop ICE from using social media surveillance against its members. The ACLU of Wisconsin recently called on Milwaukee's Common Council to pause adoption of new surveillance technology for two years, warning that data from facial recognition and license plate readers is already being weaponized to target protesters, people seeking reproductive care, and LGBTQ communities.

But the federal buildout continues. The consolidation of government databases echoes Total Information Awareness, a post-9/11 surveillance program that Congress shut down after public backlash. This time, the architecture is being assembled contract by contract, without the same scrutiny.

And it's already migrating beyond its stated purpose. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons recently said his agency was "dedicated to the mission of going after" left-wing groups. That's not immigration enforcement. But once the infrastructure exists, the justification can change.

Despite contradictory evidence, DHS maintains it does not arrest or deport U.S. citizens. But as this infrastructure grows, so will the mistakes. Citizens will be caught in them.

The physical wall never got built. What's emerging instead may be harder to see and harder to tear down.