DHS’s Immigrant Tracking Tech Lays the Ground for Authoritarian Surveillance

At the turn of the 20^th Century, U.S. eugenicists inspired authoritarian leaders of the era by beginning a more than 50-year-long period of eroding democratic protections and rights by exploiting anxieties over immigration. This allowed eugenicists to advance varied policy gains in the U.S. They introduced monitoring and profiling techniques to identify and exclude “contaminating” immigrants, normalizing the use of these instruments before expanding their use to evaluate and contain other “dysgenic” groups who were deemed a “threat” to the nation.^[7] By the mid-20^th century, these groups included far more than just immigrants. The Trump regime’s anti-immigrant strategy builds from this 19^th century movement’s playbook, using its tactics to design a system for immigrant surveillance and containment that already appears to be expanding for wider political repression.

Profiling “Good Immigrants,” Monitoring “Criminals”

Decades before the rise of Nazi Germany, eugenic profiling and data collection in the U.S. enabled anti-immigrant campaigners to suspend democratic norms, erode democratic institutions and retract given rights for growing classes of immigrants and U.S.-born citizens alike—all in the name of stopping superior groups’ “race suicide”^[8] and protecting against the rise of “degrading” forces in the U.S. The data economy that underpins the U.S. immigration system began with these ideas and techniques.

Many of today’s racial profiling instruments were developed at the height of eugenics in the late 19^th century to curb non-White immigration before being applied to other groups of people in the U.S. This included a national data collection system to monitor movement between (and later within) national borders; biometric databases and photographic ID requirements to identify “criminal types” through racializing assessments of what was visibly marked (or not) on bodies; intelligence and literacy tests to monitor for “feebleminded” immigrants; and eventually, the forced sterilization of “degrading” populations in more than 30 states, disproportionately impacting Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor women.^[9] Even as the policies and technologies shifted over time, today’s immigration system developed out of these racist instruments created to supposedly distinguish “criminals” and “inferior” groups from those who were “good” and “deserving.”

The passage of the 1875 Page Act—also known as the first Chinese Exclusion Act— relied on eugenic arguments about “Chinese racial character” as inherently criminal and immoral, resulting in the first set of U.S. laws aimed at restricting immigration of a specific ethnic or national group.^[10] With it, the U.S. introduced the world’s first biometric, photographic ID system for tracking immigrants’ cross-continental movements.^[11] Developed before the general use of passports, the new verification system initially applied to Chinese women seeking U.S. entry, and required they submit photographic and written documentation to verify their moral fitness and prove they were not criminal prostitutes.

Much like DHS’ new CBP App does now over a century later, the Page Act required immigrants to register and prove themselves to be “good” immigrants (rather than criminals) by submitting themselves to enhanced scrutiny and evaluation. Chinese women were an easy first target for anti-immigrant campaigners—villainized in eugenic propaganda as prostitutes who were “the source of the most terrible pollution of the blood”^[12] and the ruin of respectable White families, they were blamed for an impossible 90 percent of venereal disease cases in cities like San Francisco.^[13] The law was also designed to exclude them—it barred entry to women from “any Oriental country” for presumed “immoral labor.”^[14] As a result, in practice the Page Act consistently denied Chinese women entry to the U.S., until the mid-20^th century. Even when there was no basis to such eugenic profiling, these monitoring mechanisms reliably produced the data and “evidence” needed to justify groups’ exclusion and expulsion.

DHS’ new CBP Home app dramatizes the vast expansion of the MAGA Right’s monitoring capacities, now anchored around tech industry partnerships to make data profiling operate with more efficiency than ever before. The self-deportation app absurdly sells itself by offering migrants the “safe” option for deportation while saving U.S. taxpayer dollars and allowing valuable CBP resources to be focused on “the real,” violent criminals. It tells “good immigrants” to submit themselves to the state’s scrutiny, and tells them in the process, they can document themselves and their ability to make the right choices for America. Like the photoshopped images of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s tattooed fist used by the MAGA Right to “prove” alleged gang membership, this claim operates on the preposterous premise that monitoring will uncover “real evidence” to distinguish “true” criminals. But the dystopian bargain underpins a dark process already underway to make deportation—as acting ICE Director Todd Lyons grimly put it—“like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”^[15]

Profiting From Xenophobic Profiling

Under the Trump administration, ICE’s expanded data collection purports to be more precise in evaluating immigrants and “streamlining selection and apprehension operations” for their so-called “deportation logistics.”^[16] Such a project claims to reveal a true “existential threat” to American lives. But like eugenicists before them, the MAGA Right invents an “immigrant threat” that requires heightened monitoring, creating new markets for xenophobic disinformation and profiling tools.

Past anti-immigrant campaigners profited from churning out eugenic disinformation. By the turn of the century, hundreds of U.S. universities^[17] were teaching eugenics, helping spur a “golden age of eugenics publishing”^[18] that spread eugenic conspiracy theories on the “alien invasion” and national “mongrelization.”^[19] Their ideas became so popular that famed eugenicist Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916)—which warned that immigrant dangers beyond the Chinese threatened to exterminate superior American classes—sold eight editions and multiple translations, creating a new market for U.S. publishers.^[20]

Anti-immigrant eugenicists also seeded an entire intelligence testing industry that was used to segregate “feebleminded” from “mentally fit” populations at the border, and later in schools, the military and other public institutions.^[21] The eugenicist Henry Goddard helped institute these tests as a requirement under the U.S.’s 1917 Immigration Act, after deploying biased psychological exams at Ellis Island that led him to conclude that over 80 percent of non-Nordic immigrants were “feebleminded.”^[22] Targeting Jewish, southern and eastern European, and Asian immigrants in particular, the biased data helped guarantee that the 1917 and 1924 US immigration acts introduced race-based quotas to increase White immigration from northern Europe, prevent non-Anglo entry,^[23] and exclude alcoholics, paupers, and political radicals as newly recognized national threats.

MAGA 2.0 is proving once again how intensifying immigrant surveillance can be an expedient for political and financial profit, with markets already surging for immigrant profiling and data on other “threat” classes. Indeed, Trump’s recent signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act supercharges his administration’s anti-immigrant agenda. While it made headlines for its unconscionable tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy while slashing Medicaid and SNAP, the bill included major budget increases for immigration and border enforcement. The $168 billion immigration appropriation is nearly five times the $34 billion in funding, and budgets $5.9 billion for “new technology” toward “cutting-edge border surveillance”^[24]—a single allocation that outstrips the 2025 funding for all other federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and IRS.^[25]

This explosive spending supposedly allows the U.S. to reach a goal of deporting 1 million people per year and expand ICE detention capacity to an average daily population of 100,000. Many experts have questioned the feasibility of these numbers, reasoning they would be hard to achieve by targeting immigrants alone.^[26]

Even so, reports have already emerged about the Trump administration’s new contracts with Big Tech companies like Palantir and Amazon to intensify data collection for deportations. Palantir, the facial recognition company co-founded by tech billionaire and MAGA-funder Peter Thiel, received $113 million in federal government spending during Trump’s first four months in office,^[27] including a $30 million contract to build ICE a platform to combine sensitive data obtained by DOGE from agencies like the IRS, SSA, DHS, and USCIS.^[28] The ImmigrationOS  database would integrate formerly discrete public records—including tax filings, social security numbers, and immigration status—into a centralized information system to create real-time profiles used to target individuals for detention and deportation. Following reports in May that the Trump administration was in conversation with Palantir for a parallel database to merge American citizens’ personal information across government agencies,^[29]the civil rights organization Mijente noted the tech sector’s pattern of experimenting on immigrants for surveillance tech with broader applications: “We have seen Palantir test its technology on immigrant and overpoliced communities over the years. Their next steps show that they are applying what they’ve learned towards the people at-large.”^[30]

Justifying Surveillance, Suspending Democracy

Against footage played of border-crossing migrants, DHS’s ad campaign accuses past “weak politicians” for creating a national immigration ‘crisis’^[31] that now requires extreme measures to correct. But blaming democratic norms for triggering an expanded surveillance regime is a tactic from eugenics’ earliest days. Francis Galton, a cousin to Charles Darwin and the English biostatistician who seeded eugenics to create a science for profiling talent and genius, pinned his 1865 argument around the assertion that individual character and traits (including alcoholism and laziness), were genetic, and explained higher poverty and crime in certain races. Decrying national welfare policies as artificially preserving inferior weak and poor lives, and “deteriorat[ing] the breed”^[32] Galton argued that elites like him should be empowered instead to enforce policies for population monitoring, data collection, and ultimately, social engineering.  He enthused that if superior classes were empowered to exercise a program of surveillance and population control, “what a galaxy of genius might we not create!”^[33]

While eugenic disinformation allowed expansive gains in immigration bans at the turn of the century, it proved to be as powerful a tool for conditioning public tolerance for more overtly authoritarian containment measures. Withholding rights for immigrants as a special “threat” justified similar actions to contain other inferior, degrading forces. From 1907 to 1917, eugenic advocacy to legalize forced sterilization for “unfit” populations made rapid gains, with new laws to allow sterilization of convicted criminals, the mentally disabled, and the mentally ill in state custody passed in 15 states.^[34] California’s early passage of such a law allowed twenty thousand individuals to be sterilized between 1909 and 1979—largely working-class, Latinx, Indigenous, and Black women who were incarcerated or in state institutions for disabilities.^[35]

Today, the U.S. Far Right finds in immigration the ideal xenophobic catalyst and legal grey zone to enable authoritarianism’s rise. By uniquely allowing for “detention without trial, removal without a public hearing, and surveillance without probable cause,”^[36] as anthropologist James Greenberg has observed, a weaponized U.S. immigration system enables the MAGA Right to build a system designed for not only immigrant containment, but for expanded political repression and terror.

The history of anti-immigrant campaigning in the U.S. reminds us that the MAGA Right’s current campaign will not end with immigrants alone. Despite making familiar claims that it will focus on immigrant criminals for deportation, DHS’s dragnet has included resident workers, taxpaying neighbors, legal residents, international students, and legally-born citizens.^[37] Its containment efforts are also evident in sweeping arrests of lawful protestors in sanctuary cities, U.S. judges, and others who are treated as enemies of the state for challenging the regime.^[38] The inclusion of such individuals in DHS’s arrests and deportations shouldn’t be taken as an “error” in the system—it’s by design. MAGA’s anti-immigrant agenda hyper-accelerates state and for-profit surveillance operations without care for process or rights. New privately run ICE detention centers projected for California, Kansas, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Texas and Washington thus are growing without being subject to state inspections or regulations.^[39]

Trump’s personal embrace of eugenic profiling is disturbingly evident. His repeated references to immigrants as carriers of “bad genes” and criminally predisposed are now accompanied by his administration’s graphic and dehumanizing depictions of immigrants profiled in arrest videos and mug shots—circulated in online campaigns and on social media—as “animals,” “stone cold killers,” the “worst people,” and the “enemy from within.”^[40]

Over a hundred years ago, it took a context like the U.S., where immigration patterns were quickly changing national demographics, to realize eugenic ambitions through national systems for surveillance. By projecting immigrants as a threat to a White U.S., eugenicists found a reliable means to stir-up public anxieties, sustaining enough popular support to pass violent population monitoring and control bills for half a century. We now have a chance to stop this cascade from happening again by calling out what this is. DHS might tell us its operations distinguish “good immigrants” from “real criminals,” but history tells us this is a formula for authoritarian conditioning and an ever-expanding national surveillance machine.