OPINION: The ‘kill chain’ technology behind Trump’s deportations

Palantir pavilion, World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland. Photo from American community Media (Credit: Cory Doctorow. Image published via CC License 2.0)

Mounting evidence shows the Trump administration’s weaponization of data analysis to target immigrants for detention and deportation moving forward rapidly. Continued advancements in AI technology are aiding in this effort.

The ongoing erosion of digital privacy this entails could soon allow the administration to not only expand its war on immigrants but more efficiently target political enemies.

Central to the Trump administration’s strategy is exploitation of loopholes in The Privacy Act, whereby the mere allegation of criminality is enough to erode even U.S. citizens’ privacy protection.

Protections under The Privacy Act only apply to U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents, leaving undocumented immigrants particularly vulnerable. However, even U.S. citizens’ privacy protection evaporates if it is alleged that they are under investigation, as is the case for two former Trump aides accused by the president of treason for criticisms they leveled during and since his first term.

More worrisome is the judicial deference to administration claims that its enemies are “being investigated,” without evidence that an actual investigation is underway or has any basis.

In June, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a request from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for access to Social Security Administration data on the grounds that it was “investigating” fraud and waste.

The court’s three liberals dissented in the ruling, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson writing that the ruling’s “emergency” justification was based solely on the fact that the court “cannot be bothered to wait for the litigation process to play out.” (Lawsuits challenging DOGE’s request had been pending.)

Such a pretext, Jackson added, “has traditionally been insufficient to justify the kind of extraordinary intervention the Government seeks.”

Meanwhile, the adoption of military intelligence technology – developed, in part, on “kill chain” analytic work by Palantir Technologies – to sift through this newly available data means the government can now do so more accurately and at cost.

Such battlefield data analysis approaches are already being used to improve DHS’ ability to target, detain and deport immigrants. In April, DHS awarded Palantir a $30 million contract to improve its existing Investigation Management System to better target immigrants for detention.

“Palantir software is already configured to support the ICE mission and environment,” DHS noted in announcing the contract.

Juan Sebastian Pinto, a former employee of Palantir Technologies now deeply concerned about the company’s violation of its’ initial principles for ethical data analysis, explains how the process works.

“In AI-enabled military operations today, the first phases of the kill chain – finding and fixing – focus on data collection and sensor input to identify and categorize subjects as targets, threats, or non-targets,” writes Pinto on his Substack page. “This type of categorization, known as ‘fixing’ in a military context, allows corporations to mark individuals for targeted action.”

For authoritarian regimes, these targeting algorithms – which are continually being refined with new AI technology – can be applied to any government-defined group of perceived enemies, immigrant or otherwise, with staggering efficiency and for pennies on the dollar.

As might be expected, ICE and CBP have long used their own administrative data when determining, for example, where to conduct a workplace raid. The challenge is that the information may be out of date, missing, or ambiguous (e.g. multiple individuals with the same name).

Organizations such as Palantir –with sophisticated data analysis drawing from multiple datasets – can do a better job of determining where a particular “target” can be found. And, thanks to an earlier Executive Order, “Stopping Waste, Fraud and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos,” signed in March, the number of data sets available have expanded significantly. They include:

• Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)
• Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
• Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
• Social Security Administration (SSA)
• U.S. Education Department
• U.S. Postal Service

An inevitable consequence of such record sharing is that information provided by mixed-status households – where one or more family member is undocumented – for securing services such as SNAP for eligible U.S. citizen children provide indicators of immigration status which would allow an undocumented parent to be targeted.

Access to a particular individual’s data in many such cases provides access to data on their entire households, some of whom may become “collateral damage” when the data record is used for targeting detention.

Similarly, algorithms developed by Palantir experts could incorporate “indicators” such as ESL enrollment or medical treatment requiring an interpreter which do not definitively reflect citizenship/legal status but could be use in building AI-driven models for targeting.

In principle, each agency would ordinarily deny access to records with individuals’ personally identifying information as required by The Privacy Act. In today’s context, with the Trump administration clawing away at the firewalls that once guaranteed our privacy, such assumptions are anything but certain.

In our current, information-rich environment the outcome of the ongoing war over access to data will be as important or, arguably, more important than increased funding for in-the-field detentions by ICE or CBP, whose authority has now been extended nationwide.

Unfortunately, traditional judicial deference to the executive branch, premised on the assumption that the government objective is better governance, is no longer justified. All that can be hoped for at this point is a groundswell of public pressure for integrity in government and commitment to the rule of law.

Edward Kissam is a leading researcher and advocate for strategies to deal with health issues impacting immigrant communities. He has led research on farmworker and immigrant issues sponsored by the Department of Labor, the Commission on Agricultural Workers, and the National Institute for Food and Agriculture. He is also a trustee of the WKF Charitable Giving Fund.

(American Community Media)