The Trump administration’s war on immigrants began as a public spectacle dominated by masked agents, armored vehicles and raids in major cities. But an increasing share of mass immigration arrests now takes place largely out of public view. The federal government has shifted, at least in part, from overt displays of force to swift, targeted and invisible apprehensions backed by a data-gathering and surveillance system more extensive than anything seen before. The raids have not ended. The system has simply learned to hunt quietly.
American Community Media held a press briefing on the issue featuring Lena Graber, senior staff attorney at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center; Brian Hofer, executive director of Secure Justice; Jonathan Paz, a former Flock Safety whistleblower and candidate for Congress in Massachusetts’ 5th District; Abdi Soltani, executive director of the ACLU of Northern California; and Kimberly Woo, a community organizer with SIREN Immigrant Rights. The discussion offered a glimpse into a frightening future—and not only for immigrants.
ICE arrested 49,571 people in July, the highest monthly total of Donald Trump’s second presidency. Between January and July, ICE and its local partners carried out nearly 576,000 immigration arrests. That is not the same as the number of deportations: According to official figures, the Trump administration has deported more than 590,000 people since January 2025. Conflating the two figures would obscure the central issue. An arrest is not a deportation, a finding of guilt or a final immigration ruling. It is the beginning of a process in which people often must try to prove their right to remain in the country from behind bars. More than half of those arrested in July had neither a recorded criminal conviction nor a pending criminal charge.
The power of the new system does not lie primarily in some all-knowing artificial intelligence. It lies in the ability to connect vast quantities of data that were once kept separate. ICE can access immigration, travel, biometric, vehicle, address and commercial records, along with databases maintained by state and local authorities. It can purchase from data brokers information that would require a court order if obtained directly by the government. The system analyzes social media, combines cellphone location data with license-plate images and facial photographs, and turns seemingly unrelated traces into a map of a person’s movements and associations.
Palantir, best known for its military and intelligence applications, plays a central role in this system. Its ImmigrationOS platform does more than store names. It can assemble targets from multiple data sources, prioritize people marked for deportation, track the progress of cases and assist in organizing arrests. In 2026, the Department of Homeland Security entered into a $1 billion blanket purchase agreement with Palantir, allowing DHS agencies to acquire additional licenses and services without conducting a new competitive procurement. The number of artificial-intelligence applications used for immigration enforcement rose by 36 percent between late 2024 and early 2026.
A case in Oregon showed clearly how this system operates on the ground. Federal agents surrounded a van in a town populated by Latino farmworkers even though, at first, they did not know who was inside. Using Palantir data and other digital systems, they tracked the vehicle as a live target, then ordered the occupants out, handcuffed them and identified them through facial-recognition technology on a phone. In court, the government argued that the people sitting on the sidewalk with their hands restrained behind their backs had not yet been arrested; they had merely been stopped. In this case, technology was used not only to locate people, but to allow the government to apply force first and search for a suitable legal justification afterward.
Flock Safety’s nationwide license-plate recognition network brings surveillance even closer to everyday life. More than 120,000 Flock cameras operate in 49 states, capturing approximately 20 billion license-plate images each month. Nearly 40 percent of U.S. law-enforcement agencies have contracts with the company. The cameras record more than license plates. They can identify a vehicle’s make, color, damage or bumper stickers and show which vehicles routinely travel together. Fewer than 1 percent of raw matches result in actual police action, yet all the remaining data still enter a searchable system.
Flock says ICE does not receive automatic access to its data. In practice, however, local police can run searches on ICE’s behalf, and agencies can enter into direct data-sharing agreements with one another. An investigation based on public-records requests found more than 4,000 searches in which local or state police used terms such as “immigration,” “ICE” or references to ICE’s deportation branch. The federal government therefore does not necessarily need direct access to every camera. It needs only to ask a police department that already has it.
Jonathan Paz once worked for Flock, persuading municipalities to purchase its cameras. He believed the system would be used to find missing children and stolen cars. He later concluded that the company’s real objective was to embed the technology in municipal budgets and continuously expand the surveillance network. In his own city of Waltham, Massachusetts, 12 cameras appeared virtually overnight without a public hearing. Paz left the company and now helps communities organizing against Flock. His warning is blunt: People should assume that the Department of Homeland Security knows the movements revealed by the camera network.
Brian Hofer, executive director of Secure Justice, has spent 12 years working in nearly 100 municipalities to establish oversight of surveillance systems. A license plate, he argues, is never merely a license plate. The network can reveal who travels with someone, where that person goes regularly, and whether the person stops at a church, clinic, political gathering or immigration law office. In Oakland alone, 638 million license-plate images were captured in a single year, while more than 210,000 outside searches of the data were conducted each month. Residents of a city that is officially a sanctuary jurisdiction may believe they are protected by local rules even as their data pass through a back door to other agencies.
The immigration system also has many points at which people can easily be arrested without sophisticated technology. Lena Graber, senior staff attorney at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, noted that ICE arrests people at immigration courts, mandatory check-ins and workplaces, while more than half of all arrests begin with transfers from local authorities. That is why sanctuary policies—which prohibit or limit cooperation between local police and ICE—remain so important. “Sanctuary policies work,” Graber said. California is home to roughly one-quarter of the nation’s immigrants, yet during one summer period under review, only about 8 percent of ICE arrests nationwide occurred in the state. An immigrant in Texas was approximately four times as likely to be detained.
Technology, however, continually generates new targets. Government databases, information purchased from data brokers and social-media monitoring bring into the system people who previously did not appear on ICE lists. Abdi Soltani, executive director of the ACLU of Northern California, said targeting based on aggregated data falls especially heavily on vulnerable immigrant communities. Kimberly Woo, a community organizer with SIREN Immigrant Rights, has experienced the consequences within her own family. Two of her relatives were taken into custody after waiting more than 20 years, at the final hearing in the process of obtaining lawful permanent residency. One was deported. The other chose to leave voluntarily rather than be separated from the family.
Resistance to surveillance has meanwhile grown into a nationwide movement. Since August, at least 184 Flock contracts have been terminated, city councils have begun reviewing camera deployments, civil-liberties organizations are using public-records requests to uncover data sharing, and lawsuits have challenged unlawful surveillance. Bernie Sanders, Jeff Merkley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have introduced legislation that would prohibit the federal government from using Flock data and exert financial pressure on states that fail to restrict the system. Passage is doubtful under the current balance of power in Congress, but the opposition is no longer confined to one political camp. Conservative and liberal communities alike now see mass license-plate surveillance as a threat.
That matters because immigrants are only the first targets. The same network can be used to track protesters, journalists, political opponents, visitors to abortion clinics or members of religious communities. ICE has already entered photographs and license-plate numbers into a Palantir database belonging to people who monitored immigration-enforcement operations, and the Department of Homeland Security has sought data from technology companies to identify anonymous critics. Today the system is being used for deportation, but the infrastructure does not recognize immigration status. It sees a U.S. citizen exactly as it sees an undocumented person.
The next chapter in the covert war on immigrants is therefore no longer merely an immigration issue. America is deciding whether it will allow the government to compile a searchable dossier on every person’s movements, associations and opinions. The surveillance state usually begins with those whom society is least capable of protecting. But once it has been built, it does not stop there. It expands.
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