ICE and the Architecture of Authoritarianism

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

At Tech Policy Press, we’ve monitored the massive influx of money into the Department of Homeland Security to support the Trump administration’s brutal and increasingly lawless immigration crackdown. Last month saw the publication of a report commissioned by Mijente, Just Futures Law, and Surveillance Resistance Lab titled "The Tech Behind Ice: Oligarchs, Immigration Enforcement, and the Threat to Democracy." I spoke to two of the report’s authors—Surveillance Resistance Lab founder and executive director Mizue Aizeki and Just Futures Law founding executive director Paromita Shah—about what billions in tech investment is buying DHS and its component agencies, and what is necessary to reverse the authoritarian trajectory the country is on.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Dean Jackson:

I'm Dean Jackson, a contributing editor at Tech Policy Press, and I'm joined today by Mizue Aizeki from the Surveillance Resistance Lab and Paromita Shah at Just Futures Law. They're the authors of a new report, “The Tech Behind ICE: Oligarchs, Immigration, and the Threat to Democracy.”

Mizue is a social justice organizer and photographer based in New York, who has worked on issues of exterior and interior immigration enforcement in Los Angeles, Arizona, and New York for the past 15 years. Her photographs have appeared in many publications, and her projects have included migrant deaths along the US-Mexico border, impacts of US deportation policies, and migrant worker organizing in LA and New York. (Mizue is also the Executive Director of the Surveillance Resistance Lab, a project of the Collaborative Research Center for Resilience).

Paromita is the founding executive director of Just Futures Law and has worked at the intersection of racial justice and immigrant justice for over two decades. She's a racial and immigrant justice lawyer who works alongside community-based movements to end mass deportation, criminalization, and surveillance.

Thank you both so much for being here.

Paromita Shah:

Thank you for having us.

Mizue Aizeki:

Thank you.

Dean Jackson:

I wanted to start by asking if you could describe the technologies that ICE is using and developing with its newly expanded budget, the tens of millions of dollars that the agency received last year from Congress. Are these technologies dangerous because of the current authoritarian context, or are they fundamentally incompatible with civil and political rights in some way? Did the threat start with the tech, or is it the combination of tech and this time that alarms you?

Paromita Shah:

It's a good question. I mean, let's talk about that budget, I think, to give a sense of scale to the problem that we're facing. So, when the government founded the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, ICE and CBP had a budget of $9.3 billion. Now it's grown to $170 billion. That's almost a 2,000% increase. Technology has always been core to DHS's mission. They've always wanted to locate, identify, target people for deportation. It's really a mandate that has been a doorway for authoritarianism. I think that's really the underlying truth of DHS.

It's hard to understand the tech, I think, without understanding the who. So, if I could also give you some context of the who behind DHS. DHS is a Homeland Security agency. It is the second-largest federal agency in the United States. It has over 270,000 people with more agents authorized to carry guns and make arrests than the FBI and the Secret Service combined. It has no meaningful civil rights agencies. It sits on the largest biometric repository in the United States. And it is force combining at this time, force combining, IRS data, health data, social security data, housing data with immigration data. And they are doing that because they want... They are using technologies to label, classify, to track, profile and target people at an unprecedented scale. And because their goal is, and I think this administration has made it clear, they want to deport 1 million people per year.

So, what are the technologies that allow them to do it at scale are the technologies that they're investing in. But they've been investing in them for a long time. And I wish my colleague, Jacinta Gonzalez, who's also an author on the report, was here. She has an amazing way of describing kind of like the flow of the technologies, which is, she starts from the data brokers, the people who collect the data, companies like LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters and actually Equifax, credit companies that take our everyday data from using our phones and our water bills, and then they share them with ICE, follow to data analytics companies, huge ones, like Palantir, to small ones, that analyze the data, crunch the data and basically create target lists over the vast amounts of data that they now have access to.

It then moves into a bunch of spying and hacking technologies. Some new ones that might be of interest are the ones that are hacking into our phones and also hacking to our computers made by companies like Cellebrite or companies like GrayKey that are part of Paragon Solutions. They scrape the Internet, social media profiling, facial recognition. They're now going into bounty hunters. They also use cell phone tracking. And I think, obviously, license plate readers. But their biggest new foray into the tech side are drones, right? And they have this 1 billion contract. And the interesting way that DHS phrases it is, they needed it for FIFA, right? But really what they're using it for is to track and profile immigrants.

Dean Jackson:

They're not going to return the drones to Amazon after.

Paromita Shah:

I guess they could, right? I mean, that is how acting director, right, Lyons, last year, he said that he wanted the deportation system to run like Amazon Prime. And so I think your reference to Amazon is completely on point.

Dean Jackson:

That's just where I would go to buy a drone. But yeah, it was a chilling statement. I remember when he said that. It sounds like, though, that it's not one type of data or one new type of technology, like, for example, facial recognition cameras, that's driving the threat. It's the preponderance of all of these new capabilities. Would you say that that's fair?

Paromita Shah:

Yeah, I think all these technologies, and we have a list of them in the report along with a smaller fact sheet, but kind of goes through this list, it's absolutely designed to work together, collect information together, to create a dossier of information, of sensitive personal information, to locate people at a very micro level. So, I think DHS is interested in building a large arsenal of technology for the purpose of tracking people. And we know that it's not just going to be on immigrants. We already know that this kind of... These systems are designed to monitor the population at large. They expand the government's ability to surveil political activity, dissent and protest movements in everyday life.

And one of the most chilling aspects of this new foray into these technologies is that DHS has partnered with DOJ in a way that DOJ has turned into DHS's lawyer. It is their law firm. And when the biggest law firm in the country becomes DHS's law firm, they've obviously accelerated policing powers, they've dismantled core due process protections, and they're working with ICE right now, working with DHS to identify political targets. That's why we see so many prosecutions like in Prairieland and all around the country.

Dean Jackson:

Could you say a little bit more about Prairieland? Because we often talk about the threat to civil rights from surveillance as something in the future, right? The government could do this. And yet, you've just laid out the way all this technology allows tracking of domestic dissenters. And in Prairieland, we seem to have possibly an instance where the government has used that technology against citizens. Could you just explain a little bit more for the audience what happened in Prairieland?

Paromita Shah:

Yeah. In that case, a number of activists went to a detention center in Texas, and there was what DHS is characterizing an attack on a facility, an attack on agents. And it's not that didn't occur. It was the way in which the prosecution was handled. They swept in people who were peripheral to that event, people who had been distributing zines, people who had been around there but hadn't participated directly in the attack. They labeled them all with this broad brush as domestic terrorists, as Antifa terrorists. And as a result, they got these really disproportionate, very scary sentences across the board. And I think what was most chilling about that case was the way in which the government has chosen to see that case as a success for other test cases that they want to bring around domestic terrorism. I think Mizue and I can go into that later on.

But the way in which DHS and DOJ have partnered to label more and more people as anti-American, anti-capitalist, having extreme views around immigration to justify prosecutions, investigations, not only of immigrants but of people who are lawfully observing them, people who are engaged in direct action. It's come to a point where even the prosecutions in Minnesota are really, you could see, are going to be the other test case for DHS. Like, will they win these charges against the 14 protesters in Minnesota that had been activated on the deaths of multiple people, including Nicole Good and Alex Pretti? And at this time when we're talking about deaths right now of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastián Guerrero, those just happened this past week, DHS has been reticent about even halting what they are doing. The first thing that they do is they claim that these individuals weaponized their cars, that they were threats to DHS agents.

And the ironic thing is that they were using technology from the very beginning to target people, people who had never been on their investigative list to begin with. And it really doesn't matter if they were on their target list to begin with at the end of the day, because now the tools that they have aren't really preventing deaths, aren't really preventing harm, which is another justification that DHS likes to use, is that the surveillance is a gentler, less damaging way. In fact, they've caused more chaos, more damage, more deaths directly at their hands than at any time, honestly, in their history.

Dean Jackson:

DHS and ICE have both been accused of acting lawlessly. Can those organizations and their use of tech specifically be meaningfully reformed after they've had the chance to operate with this much impunity?

Mizue Aizeki:

I'm going to go back a little bit to what Paromita opened with, with this idea of what we detail in our report, how DHS as an agency has led to a pathway to this moment because they've always operated almost in a suspended set of laws. In other words, DHS was founded after 9/11 as part of the war on terror as the primary agency to oversee homeland security. And its primary mandate was focused on preventing terrorist attack in the United States. But then everything under DHS became about terrorism. So immigrants are potential terrorists. The whole thing with having every Muslim man in the United States register under special registration after 9/11 was because these were all potential terrorists. None of that has ever been proven. But billions of dollars have been spent. And what has been legitimated is indefinite detention, the kinds of things that Paromita just mentioned about people being killed by federal law enforcement officers repeatedly. This is not normal in a certain way, but it's become the new normal under the logics of national security under DHS and Homeland Security.

And so, just to talk a little bit more about this conflation of immigration enforcement and counterterrorism, the idea we say that this is all... Our report, “The Tech Behind ICE: The Oligarchs, Immigration Enforcement, and the Threat to Democracy,” really, the key thing to understand is how much democracy has been undermined by what 9/11 did to concentrate so much power, national security power in the executive branch, but also embraced very widely by every other branch of the government. So, here we are 23 years later where routine immigration enforcement has become just tied up into this issue of warfare. So, we are seeing much more entanglement of the Department of War with the DHS, whether it's domestically or internationally. And if you look at Trump's 2027 budget, an analysis showed that 80% of the request was for policing and military. And we've already seen what the cost has been for social care, education, housing, and healthcare, and the climate.

And so, when you're asking in terms of DHS acting lawlessly, we also have to recognize that the part of the reason DHS has so much power is the very legal regime that it sits upon is designed to give the state, the government, maximum power to detain people, to deport people and exclude people. How else could you deport 1 million people in one year, right? And so, now that coupled with the resources for the largest policing apparatus in the world, and then all this technology, and an entire economy, then that gets organized around creating more and more invasive and powerful technology tools to grow this surveillance and security state, this is what we're confronting right now.

And so, I just want to talk a little bit for a second about this idea of the term terrorist, because it's so instrumental to the power of the government right now, and really is very much part of the 9/11 legacy, is that every single president can use this term terrorism to include whatever is helpful to their political agenda. So, Elizabeth Beavers just wrote this really great report called Terrorizing Migrants, where she details how much power has been given to the executive branch to basically deem any group as a terrorist group, whether or not they engage in any political violence, or even if it's a group at all, which is a perfectly goes in with what you were saying about Prairieland, right? And so, we can't separate what happened in Prairieland with what DHS, the founding of DHS and everything that it represents, and a counterterrorism strategy that can very comfortably turn outward to the world, like fishermen in Venezuela, or inward, to people creating leaflets because they are concerned about one social issue or another.

I mean, coming back to your original question, do we feel safer now? Do we feel safer in this tech-fueled surveillance state with very little healthcare, with no CDC monitoring pathogens that are giving people tremendously bad diarrhea? I don't, right? And so, I think that's what's become increasingly clear is that this isn't just a concern for immigrants or US residents. It's everybody all over the world. And so we have to find solutions that are more than body cameras or ICE agents showing their faces. I would say we need to ask a different question, like, what does it really mean to be truly secure and safe? What would we need to have the kind of world we really want to live in? And it's got to be something different than investing hundreds of billions in dollars in an agency that claims they're providing us security when it's really just more surveillance and more repression and more death.

Dean Jackson:

I think that you're exactly right, that there's a stretching of the imagination that needs to occur, not only when it comes to reforming federal agencies but how we think about safety in our society.

Your report, though, I want to keep us moving along because you cover quite a lot of ground. One of the more interesting things I thought was how you outlined the massive pipeline of federal defense and security contracts for tech companies, which correlates both with Silicon Valley's rightward political turn and the huge increase in tech industry lobbying in Washington. So, could you say a little bit more about the role ideology plays in the D.C.-tech sector relationship and contrapose that with the incentive for simple grift when budgets get this big?

Mizue Aizeki:

This was a really big reveal for us as we were doing the research for our report, The Tech Behind ICE. Everybody was struck by that image at the inauguration of 2025 with all the tech bros who, at least before, some of them are much more Democratic Party aligned or neutral politically, some of them even anti-Trump, were all showed up signaling their alignment with the Trump administration. And so, what is behind that and what has happened has been so many different things. And I'm going to ask Paromita to talk a little bit about the deregulatory agenda that these guys have. But the scale of money that they have is something that we did a bit of research into our report, and it was actually quite discouraging to keep having to edit their net worth as our report drafts kept happening. It's like, we'd have to go back and... We all know about the trillionaire that happened during the time we were drafting our report.

But it's really, it's so many things that have been very traditional ways to buy access that includes really unthinkable amounts of campaign contributions that we detail in the report. There's also a significant amount of lobbying. There's a graph in the report where we show how the lobbying by the venture capitalist firms of the tech oligarchs has skyrocketed in recent years. And it's just important to point out that almost a third of the lobbying spending from these companies in 2025 was from Palantir and SpaceX, right? So, even as powerful as these companies are, and as much mission-critical they are to the government, they still find it so important to figure out... They have to invest a lot of money in lobbying.

But the other thing that we pointed out, which is really troubling, is how what we commonly understood as a revolving door, I mean, what we understand commonly as a revolving door, where either you work for government and then you go work for a corporation or the other way around, that's still happening. But what we're experiencing right now is kind of a new era of what we call these corporate oligarchs in the corner office. And by that, we mean is that they are calling the shots, directing the vision. They each espouse different theories on democracy, why their corporations are critical to the project of US national security. They've been pushing to modernize the military in the vein of the famous quote by Zuckerberg, I think it is, "You got to move fast and break things," right?

And then JD Vance, of course, is someone who comes to the Trump administration after having spent time working with these venture capitalists. And so there's a way in which they're embedded in the government in a way that has a newness to it that we think is worth understanding and exploring. Of course, there's tech executives now that are serving as an Executive Innovation Corps in the US Army. And then you have a former employee of one of the largest contractors, Anduril. They get 80% of their money, their revenue is from federal contracts. He's now the DHS chief information officer and the chief AI officer. He continues to hold half a million in stock in the company, but he's also going to be overseeing the largest biometric database in the US government, which is integral to DHS operations.

So, I think there's a lot more to say there, but I think, Paromita, there's definitely stuff that you can add to this.

Paromita Shah:

Yeah. I mean, it does feel a little bit... And this was the name of the chapter, The Tech Gilded Age. And I wouldn't say that we are anti-technology. I think it's so easy for people to label us as like, "You just don't understand or hate the technology." That's not what this is about. This is about what is the technology being used for, who was controlling the development, and how these specific tech bros, these oligarchs, are really setting up conditions for the corrosion of democracy, right? And it is in a state of fast corrosion.

I think some of the ways that they capture the people's, the public's imagination, rather, is by making out some outlandish claims about their products. Like, I think AI has long been sitting in this radiant ether of having no problems, no issues, no faults and no inaccuracies, and there's been a lot of buy-in to that. And yet, what we can see on the ground is that the use of these AI-enabled technologies are causing massive harm, including, I think, breaking guardrails around privacy and constitutional rights in a way that we have not yet fully uncovered as much as we're trying.

But a couple of points that I think are interesting. I don't know if you saw that Alex Karp said that everyone should be clamoring for more Palantir because Palantir's products are actually the best guardians of the Fourth Amendment. His point is that... I mean, this is what I find so fascinating about people who believe his statement to investors includes cryptic analogies to one Supreme Court case called Katz and presumes to know everything about the scope and the scale and the nuances of the Fourth Amendment. And just because he actually mentions the name and has a PhD in... I think it's philosophy.

Dean Jackson:

I think that's right.

Paromita Shah:

Yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting that he thinks he understands how this technology is operating on the ground at the same time that people are actually dying. And his products are really the backbone of a lot of DHS technologies. It is going to be the platform upon which many of these operations are going to rest on. And in fact, they have a 1 billion open contract with ICE where competitive bidding is not allowed because of how integral Palantir is to the system. So, it feels like an after-the-fact justification, not a real one.

But really, to me, no offense, it kind of underplays it to call it a grift. This administration combined with DHS is interested in attacking states that oppose their agenda. So if you look at the AI Action Plan that was put out there, they are interested in creating a deregulatory environment conducive to the companies that want to set up shop and make plays in municipal budgets, in state budgets. They're looking for other sources of income. And so they set up, for example, a DOJ AI Litigation Task Force to sue states that set up policies and practices that may be contrary to what they want, which is a regulatory environment that's not going to get in the way of them making profits. And that really poses an existential threat to advocacy and organizing by people who are looking to essentially protect their communities from harm. It threatens sanctuary cities. It threatens people who just simply have a different idea.

And I feel like it also is a pathway to upending democracy because you're using DOJ and DHS as a bulldog, really, to get what you want. It takes away the public interest and supplants it with their own personal interest, all at the same time that they're actually keeping... They're earning revenues and their stock portfolios are growing while they sit at DHS, while they sit on the Presidential Council of Science and Technology advisors, while they sit at DOJ. Their stock portfolios are growing. That feels like a grift.

But what they're doing, actually, is they're undermining democracy by creating infrastructure to attack states and to build in their idea of what good governance looks like, which so far includes not only the domestic terrorism context but also the Unbiased AI Principles, which have to now be part and parcel of any AI program. And that really, if you read what the Unbiased AI Principles say about DEI, it should really like make your heart thump. It really says the most ugly things about systemic race discrimination, about people who are transgender, about people who fight for reproductive rights, people who are anti-capitalists, people who they say have extreme views on immigration or on anything that the Trump administration does not like. It has also turned into, I think, a placeholder for those domestic terrorism principles to live. It will live in the programs that they sell to municipalities and states.

Dean Jackson:

And I think what you've outlined is a series of ways in which the tech sector and particularly some of the people we identify as being on the tech right, although not all of them are, have embedded themselves in government. And they're really, they're entwined in ways that are economic, in ways that are related to their personal finances, political, related to their donations, but also their ideologies, and then sort of operational, right? There's tech that the government now has at its disposal or even relies on.

Paromita Shah:

Or data centers that they want, or new weapons centers that they want to build, or companies that they favor over another. I mean, they really do want to build the infrastructure by releasing the over dozen executive orders that they have on AI.

Dean Jackson:

So, my question really is, some of these things, if there's a change in power in 2028, seem like they might end right or untangle. It's hard to imagine the relationship between D.C. and Silicon Valley going back to what it was during the Obama administration, for example. So, there will be some frostiness. But others seem like quite able to continue. Growing up in the post-9/11 era has sort of made me firmly believe that the government doesn't like to give up capabilities or powers that it accrues. And so it's possible to imagine some of these things having persistence, even in a new Democratic administration. But I guess what I'm curious about is how you think this relationship might change if there is a change in the party in the White House.

Paromita Shah:

Yeah. I think, I'm putting an asterisk beside the if, if there is a change, who knows? I think there's enough turbulence in our government. It's not clear to me that even if we won the election, whether we'd be able to take the government with us. I really hope that Democrats have learned the lesson of what it means to have grown an agency that has become the front agency for authoritarian actions in just 25 years. That agency has become the second-most powerful agency in the United States in just 25 years.

And I feel like while we are talking about some of what I hope the new Congress, hopefully, would do if we got what we wanted, I hope that they reckon with that. I hope that we're not going to see on the edges reforms around turning DHS into a better police department. I think a better police department would not necessarily have saved the lives that were lost over the last year. It would not have saved the lives lost in our detention center. I also hope that this incoming administration would leave behind the delusions that they have around AI and its primacy to the US leadership in the world. I think we have to ask some serious questions about what it means to be a leader and what it means to make money and who is profiting from that.

And I think what Democrats and Republicans have done is that they have not linked what these technologies have done, what they're buying, what they're funding directly to human behavior, whether it's DHS violence or food safety, or whether it's access to benefits, whether it's going to be about air safety. I mean, there's a lot that they're claiming AI can overhaul and run. And what we have seen is that actually we need a lot more people than we realize. I am hopeful to some degree that Democrats will pay attention, but I know the influence of these oligarchs is very strong. And unwinding their influence in our government, externally as well as internally, is going to be very difficult.

And I think about the lasting impact of DOGE in the government, not only in the way that they have fired over 200,000 people in our federal government, I think close to 300,000 now, but how so much of that expertise that had made us leaders at least somewhat in health research and medical research has now been lost. And so, I wonder what it will take for Democrats to invest in the general public. That's what I'm hoping for. In the meantime, I think there are things that they can do now. They need to pay attention. They can't ignore what the technology is doing. They really do need to bring in tech oligarchs into Congress, and they need to interrogate them. They need to understand what is behind their programs and what is in the black box algorithm to understand whether it's actually benefiting the US people, whether it's turning a buck. I do think they need to protect states who have their own policies. And I think they need to protect states that have sanctuary city policies. They can't be in the business of attacking states and railroading states into a particular ideology. And I hope that they will continue their protection of vulnerable minority communities across the country.

Mizue, I know there's so many things I've missed. Do you want to add more?

Mizue Aizeki:

I think I'll just go back to the thing that I raised earlier about really thinking about what safety and security mean. 9/11 was a crisis. And the solution to that crisis was war, right? Indefinite detention, more and more detention and the growing of an agency that has, I think, become just supercharged, not just in terms of its size but how much it's animated all sorts of thinking about what's even possible. And when Paromita was speaking, I was thinking about this idea of how we've been living in this suspended state of emergency since 9/11.

Paromita Shah:

Yeah.

Mizue Aizeki:

And so, what happens under a state of emergency is rights get suspended, priorities are put towards maybe some more policing or militarization and detention. That threat never goes away for them.

And to your question, what has to happen, whether it's 2028 or now, is like, the threat is in front of us already, but the threat isn't outside of DHS. The threat is DHS. So, what are we going to do about it? And I think that there has to be some real soul-searching about, how is it that we've gotten to this point? And how is it that we're going to start really reinvesting back in our communities, back in healthcare systems, back in tracking of foodborne pathogens, education and all the things that we have lost?

And so, we've spoken a lot about in this topic around DHS and all that. But what Paromita talked about, DOGE and all the things, there's a whole web of things that have either been dismantled or undermined that we have to figure out how to reconstruct. But there also is a hunger still for people in this country to want something better than what we have now. And I think it's really time for the Democrats to get it, that what we don't want is more DHS and more military. What we actually want is a fighting chance to live. We don't have a choice.

Paromita Shah:

The last thing that we can talk about is, if they really want to talk about tech, because we have our feet both in the tech world and the DHS world, it's like, they could actually talk about different ideas of privacy or data governance. Privacy shields have been such a failure for non-citizens. I mean, it's been also another way in which DHS bulldozed their access to so many other people's data, is because the Privacy Act doesn't cover non-citizens, except for legal permanent residents. And so, they have used that really to gain access to all types of infrastructure. And what they have always wanted is not only the access to people's data but the key to municipal governments, key to state governments. And so, I think if we can just put an end in the way that our local and city governments are being exploited and attacked by DHS, it would do so much, I think, for communities who are facing this pain right now.

Dean Jackson:

Yeah, and I'm glad you brought that up because to close this out, we've spent so much time at the federal level. I wanted to bring us back down to the ground level, to the local level. Just by way of example, I'm recording this cloud podcast from Cleveland, Ohio, where there's a really active debate about the future of the city's relationship with Flock. It's the automated license plate reader cameras to our police department. And of course, that data is accessible by federal agencies, including ICE. And so the city is debating, should it seek alternative bids from other providers? Should it have the system at all? And the community has various viewpoints on that.

Cleveland has considered both permitting for large data center contracts and also a brief moratorium on those types of projects. And I'm wondering, is it meaningful to switch camera providers or to put in contract stipulations for companies like Flock? Should cities be drawing that line between the infrastructure that powers these technologies on the ground and communities inside of data centers and the political outcomes that we've discussed? What should people be doing in the cities, in the places where they live, not just in Washington, D.C., but across the country? What should people be doing to respond to the trends and threats to freedom that you played out?

Paromita Shah:

Well, the good news is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. And so there's actually so many ways that you can build in protections for your residents. It can be through a contract cancellation. It could be amending the contract. It could be finding different vendors. It could be deciding not to use it. It could be finding new protections that will limit the way and how the technology will be used. And I actually encourage people to explore all the options because we don't have enough examples yet. We're just beginning the process of fighting for these local policies. And I would say that comes from experience. Mizue and I worked on sanctuary cities' policies, starting in the mid-2000s. And I would say that there were just a handful and now there are hundreds. And it is because each state government is like its own quilt. Each city is like its own crochet kid. And you really have to find different ways in which you can protect your community and the interests of the people who live in it.

I think it's a meaningful development that municipalities are finally asking questions about the purpose and scale of automated license plate reader technologies, including Flock, because we have now seen so publicly the deaths and abuse by ICE, and that is always really important for city councils, for state governments to assess as to whether the product is too dangerous, whether it's too violative of rights, whether it's too expensive or unnecessary, whether it violates constitutional rights, whether it invites exposure to litigation. They're going to have views on that. It is just really important at this time to get clear about what it's doing, because that is actually hard work to understand what's in the black box because that's actually also really hard to get from these companies, and to see what parts of the budget they are targeting. Because honestly, you don't know if it's the police department or whether it's a city council member who's just friendly with the company. There's so many ways that they can bring in these products.

I think you asked about Flock. I remember a few years ago when Flock cameras and their competitors were in that competition to get on the municipal budgets around the country. It's only now that some municipalities realize that there were so many privacy protocols that were being broken, that civil rights violations were being facilitated by these technologies. But more importantly, I don't think they knew themselves. We knew that this information was being shared with ICE and hundreds of other third parties. And that means the data that it's collecting beyond just your license plate, but your location, potentially facial scan information, is going to places you had no idea it was going to. And that is something we put in our report, is that while cooperation or sharing of data is something that they put down as a positive development, it's really just word salad for what they really want, which is access to the keys of your local government and to ensure that they get renewed contracts.

Right now, I feel like there's a real opportunity. It was so great to see like the way in which Dayton, Ohio, was just putting garbage bags over the Flock cameras. It really just showed how they were flexing their muscle with the technology simply just by cutting off their access. And it, I think, offers imagination to the more than 30 cities that have decided to cut their contracts with Flock to become better stewards for their communities. But I do think right now, it's more important than ever. And I'm really glad it's happening in places like Ohio, that it's happening in some places like Texas. It's happening in red states. It's got to happen not only in blue states, it's got to happen in red states. And it's important because I think when people start discovering what they're collecting beyond your name and your license plate, that they have access to everything, from where your kids are going to school to your mortgage to your water bill to where you have been in your locality, I think it will make all the difference in how we start regulating these technologies.

Mizue Aizeki:

I just want to say really quickly, part of the reason why the local is so important is because where we can fight, obviously. These are our homes. And I think kind of back to what we are trying to tease out a little bit here is it's really about democracy and how is it that we can have a say in defining the things that are most important to us, but also just say on the point of ICE. Paromita knows this is my favorite thing to always break up, but ICE knows that it can only be as successful as they want to be by having force multipliers. And it's always been very much central to their agenda to have police departments, what's the word, collaborating with them to the maximum amount possible.

So whether that's in 287(g) agreements where police agencies sign an MoU, where they can become authorized to become immigration agents, to the automatic fingerprint sharing that happens every time everyone is booked, all of this stuff is stuff that ICE did by design, and we fought every single part of it. And the reason why we fought it is because of exactly this point around nobody... These are infrastructures that, when they're combined together, can do really tremendous harm. And so, we have to figure out locally then where we can put the pressure to stop it. And so, I think it's just one of these examples where we don't really have a choice but to fight, but where better to fight than in the place that you call home.

Dean Jackson:

Well, thank you both so much for being here.

Paromita Shah:

Oh, thank you so much for having us. We had fun. Thank you.

Mizue Aizeki:

Thank you so much, Dean.