ICE can ID you from that selfie you posted three years ago. They can read your texts without a warrant. They know more about your life than your mom does. And when Trump's back in office, guess who's next on their list after immigrants?
They threw over a hundred million dollars building surveillance infrastructure that would make authoritarian regimes jealous. This isn't law enforcement anymore - it's digital dragnet fishing where they scoop up everything and sort out the "bad guys" later.
Clearview AI got millions to scan billions of photos they scraped off social media without asking anyone. ICE claims it's for "child exploitation cases" - the same excuse every authoritarian uses to justify mass surveillance. Once they have this capability, you think they give a shit about scope limitations?
Here's the fucked up part: facial recognition fails constantly, especially if you're not white. But ICE doesn't care about false positives when they're hunting people down.
Then there's the phone spyware. Paragon Solutions got $2 million for Israeli military spyware that can hack any smartphone remotely. Biden froze this contract last year because, shocker, letting ICE use NSO Group-style spyware might be a bad idea. Trump reactivated it last week. Now ICE can read your WhatsApp messages, track your location, and access your entire digital life without a warrant.
Palantir's database system is where things get really fucked. Peter Thiel's company got over $95 million to build what insiders call "tables upon tables" of data. Want to find every person from Guatemala who entered through El Paso, has brown hair, and lives within 50 miles of a specific address? Palantir can do that search in seconds.
But Palantir's shit breaks constantly. Their system times out on complex searches, crashes under load, and needs daily restarts. Public documents show ICE complaining about system failures during operations. Meanwhile Peter Thiel gets richer while families get torn apart using his buggy surveillance platform.
LexisNexis runs the background checks - over a million searches in seven months through their Accurint system. That's millions annually to dig through your entire life history, from credit reports to utility bills to social media scraping. They call it "predictive surveillance," which is corporate speak for "we investigate people who haven't committed crimes yet."
Here's what pisses me off: ICE blew over $100 million on surveillance tech while claiming they don't have money for humane detention facilities. Clearview AI's CEO became a multimillionaire selling scraped photos to hunt immigrants. Palantir's stock jumps every time Trump tweets new deportation numbers.
Tech companies are profiting off human suffering, and they're not even pretending otherwise. Internal Palantir wikis leaked to 404 Media show employees trying to rationalize building deportation databases. Their solution? Develop "ImmigrationOS" to make deportations more efficient.
Here's the bigger problem: Once you build this surveillance infrastructure, it doesn't stay focused on immigrants. Today it's undocumented workers. Tomorrow it's protesters, journalists, or anyone who disagrees with whoever's running things. These systems don't get smaller - they get bigger.
ICE's surveillance budget could build actual infrastructure instead. Congress just approved $150 billion for immigration enforcement - making ICE the largest law enforcement agency. But we get facial recognition systems that fuck up constantly and databases that crash when you need them most. Private companies are cashing in on this deportation-industrial complex while they keep delivering broken shit.
People in immigrant communities already avoid certain neighborhoods because they know ICE has cameras there. That's what we're paying for: fear. Entire communities living scared because the government can track anyone, anywhere, anytime.