US President-elect Donald Trump will return to power next year with a host of technological tools at his disposal that will help him deliver on his campaign promise to toughen immigration policies, including surveillance technology and artificial intelligence that The Biden administration already uses it to make crucial decisions in terms of tracking, detaining and ultimately deporting unauthorized immigrants.
Although immigration authorities have used the technology for years, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) letter, dated October, obtained exclusively by The Associated Press, details how those tools, some of which work With AI, they help decide whether an immigrant should be detained or monitored.
One algorithm, for example, rates immigrants with a “hurricane score,” between 1 and 5, to assess whether a person will try to “evade” DHS oversight.
The letter, sent by DHS artificial intelligence director Eric Hysen to immigrant rights group Just Futures Law, revealed that the score estimates the potential risk that an immigrant, with a pending case, will not appear before the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials. Hysen wrote that ICE agents consider the score, among other information, to make decisions about an immigrant’s case.
“The hurricane score does not make decisions about detention, deportation or surveillance; rather it is used to support human decisions,” Hysen wrote.
The government’s toolkit also includes a mobile app called SmartLINK that uses facial recognition and can track an immigrant’s specific location.
Almost 200,000 people without authorization to remain in the country who are in deportation proceedings are enrolled in the Alternatives to Detention program, under which certain immigrants can remain in the United States while their immigration procedures are resolved.
When they join this program, SmartLINK and the geolocators used by ICE rigorously track these immigrants and their movements. The app uses facial recognition technology and geolocation data, which has been used before to find and arrest app users.
Just Futures Law wrote to Hysen this year, questioning whether it was fair to use an algorithm to assess whether a person posed a flight risk and raising concerns about the amount of data SmartLINK collects. These AI systems, which rate or evaluate people, are widely used but still largely unregulated, even though some have been found to discriminate based on race, gender or other factors.
DHS said in an email that it is committed to ensuring that AI is used transparently, that privacy and civil rights are protected, and that bias is avoided. He added that he is working to implement the Biden administration’s requirements on the use of AI, but Hysen said in his letter that DHS officials may be exempt from those requirements for certain uses. Trump has publicly vowed to repeal Biden’s AI policy when he returns to the White House in January.
“DHS uses AI to support our staff in their work, but DHS does not use results generated by AI systems as its sole basis for law enforcement actions or denying benefits,” a DHS spokesperson told the AP.
Trump has not revealed how he plans to carry out his promised deportation of some 11 million people living in the country illegally. Although it has proposed invoking wartime powers as well as military involvement, the plan would face major logistical challenges, such as where to house detainees and how to find people scattered across the country, something that surveillance tools operated by AI could help solve.
Karoline Leavitt, a Trump spokeswoman, did not answer questions about how the incoming administration plans to use DHS technology, but said in a statement that “President Trump will mobilize all federal and state power necessary to carry out the most comprehensive deportation operation.” great” in American history.
More than 100 civil society groups sent a letter Friday urging the White House Office of Management and Budget to require DHS to comply with the Biden administration’s guidelines. This body did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Just Futures Law Executive Director Paromita Shah said that if immigrants are labeled flight risks, they are more likely to remain in detention, which would “limit their ability to prepare their defense in immigration court, which would “It’s already difficult enough.”
The SmartLINK application, operated under the Intensive Appearance Supervision Program (ISAP), is managed by BI Inc., a subsidiary of private prison management company The GEO Group, which also contracts with ICE to run detention centers for unauthorized immigrants.
ICE has provided little information about how it uses SmartLINK’s geolocation feature to find and detain immigrants. However, public records show that during Trump’s first term in 2018, employees of BI Inc. based in Manassas, Virginia, provided the geolocations of immigrants to federal authorities, who later arrested more than 40 people.
In a report last year to address privacy concerns, DHS said the mobile app includes security features that “prohibit access to information on the participant’s mobile device, with the exception of location points when The application is open.”
But the report notes that there remains a risk that data collected from people “could be misused for unauthorized persistent monitoring.”
Such information could also be stored in other ICE and DHS databases, an agency that could use it for other purposes, the report warns.
In calls with investors earlier this month, private prison management companies were clear about the opportunities ahead.
The GEO Group CEO George Christopher Zoley said he expects the incoming Trump administration to “take a much more aggressive approach to border security as well as domestic engagement and to request additional funding from the Congress to achieve these objectives.”
“In the GEO ISAP program, we can increase the current number of 182,500 participants to several hundred thousand, or even millions of participants,” Zoley said.
That same day, the head of another private prison company told investors he would closely watch how the new administration might modify immigration monitoring programs.
“It’s an opportunity for multiple contractors to work with ICE on this program going forward and come up with creative and innovative solutions, not only to get better results, but also to increase the reach of the program as needed,” Damon said. Hininger, CEO of private prison company CoreCivic Inc., at a conference to present his results.
GEO did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement, CoreCivic said it has played “a valuable but limited role in the United States immigration system” for both Democratic and Republican administrations for more than 40 years.