The Rise of Digital Authoritarianism: Why ICE's A.I.-Powered Deportation Tools Echo Chinese Government Tactics

My latest academic article examines how authoritarian rulers leverage technology to achieve undemocratic ends and what that means for immigration enforcement.

ICE has increasingly relied on technology to facilitate mass deportations during the current immigration enforcement surge. ICE is working with Peter Thiel’s company Palantir to develop and deploy ImmigrationOS, an AI-powered platform that scoops up massive amounts of data that ICE can use to expedite deportation. Over the summer, ICE began using Graphite, a phone-hacking platform similar to Pegasus. And just this week, The Verge reported that ICE has also contracted with Zignal Labs to provide expansive social media monitoring of immigrants.

It would be easy to see these technologies in isolation, each one as one-off landmines in the landscape of civil and human rights, or to see them together as part of a comprehensive and invasive approach to immigration enforcement under the current Trump administration.

But as I argue in my latest article for Dialogues on Digital Society, I believe we should see ICE’s use of technology as part of a broader global trend toward what scholars call “digital authoritarianism.” If authoritarianism is characterized by a concentration of power exercised by increasingly unaccountable leaders, then digital authoritarianism is the use of technology to facilitate both the exercise of undemocratic power and the insulation of leaders from democratic accountability.

Early accounts of digital authoritarianism were restricted to nominally authoritarian countries like China, whose leaders have leveraged technology for years to embed networks of control throughout society. But more recent studies, mine included, argue that the technologies and practices found in authoritarian regimes can be found in democratic countries, too. We refer to these as digital authoritarian practices as a way of signaling the congruence of specific tactics across contexts that are legally and politically divergent.

To put it simply, the United States is not China. But the United States, and ICE in particular, is certainly adopting technologies that encapsulate a totalizing vision for social monitoring and control that facilitates arrest, detention, and deportation. We sometimes describe the Chinese economy as “capitalism with Chinese characteristics”. Perhaps we should describe the Trump administration’s use of technology as “digital authoritarianism with American characteristics.”

Moreover, because all authoritarian regimes are insatiable in their need for internal enemies to justify the exceptional accumulation of power, attention to digital authoritarian practices helps us to see that these technologies will inevitably affect all of us—not only immigrants.

Some readers may take offense at using the term authoritarian in relation to the current administration, so let me clarify three points. First, there’s a difference between living in an authoritarian state and living in a state that includes authoritarian rulers and politicians. I do not think the United States is an authoritarian state. I do think we live in a country with authoritarian and authoritarian-lite leaders. Trump’s testing of the waters about a third unconstitutional term as president is a classic and incontrovertible authoritarian trope.

Second, when I say authoritarian here, I do not mean it as a slur or an insult—I mean it as an objectively and appropriately-applied definition of the term, not as a value judgement. With the mountain of evidence before us, the question is not so much whether President Trump is authoritarian, the question is whether one believes that Trump’s authoritarianism is a good thing or a bad thing. Let’s at least be honest about that.

I don’t think authoritarianism is a good thing. Clearly many of my fellow Americans disagree, or they at least find certain forms of authoritarianism to be acceptable in certain domains, under certain circumstances, and exercised against certain other people who deserve the exceptional forms of punishment that authoritarianism promises. Of course, authoritarianism doesn’t care about you, so the conceit of authoritarian adherents is that it won’t ever effect them—and inevitably it does.

Third, while I do believe its fair to describe the Trump administration’s use of technology as a kind of digital authoritarianism, as I say in my article, previous administrations, including the Biden administration, helped lay its foundation. Democratic and Republican administrations alike that adopt frameworks of institutional “efficiency” (with efficiency defined and measured from an artificially restricted pool of expedient variables) may inadvertently construct precisely the systems that can be easily co-opted and weaponized.

This isn’t an unsympathetic critique or an argument against government innovation. By analogy, I would feel bad, but not guilty, if someone stole my car and ran over another person, which is, one could argue, what authoritarian rulers do with democratic institutions and technologies. On the other hand, given recent history, one has to be willfully myopic not to foresee the potential for massive harm when building or adopting new immigrant monitoring systems. There is a fine line between using technology for good and naively laying the foundation for bad actors to subvert technology for nefarious ends. Anyone who watches science fiction understands the intended lessons of HAL 9000 in the 2001 Space Odyssey or Skynet in the Terminator series.

I grapple with these questions by looking at the transformation of CBP One into CBP Home. The article that came out last week, titled “Digitizing deportation: CBP One, CBP Home, and the infrastructure of digital authoritarianism,” is freely available to the public—so go download it, read it, and let me know what you think. It’s short for an academic article because it is part of a special issue on digital authoritarianism that includes a few dozen similarly brief yet thoughtful essays. See the Dialogues on Digital Society Special Issue.

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