Jose Hermosillo was already having a pretty crappy day when he got out of the ER after having just suffered a seizure. He was in Tucson, visiting a girlfriend, and attempting to find his way when he asked a friendly neighborhood ICE officer for help. Hermosillo tried to say he was lost and from New Mexico, but the ICE officer detained him for illegally entering from Mexico and he was held in ICE custody for 10 days, until his parents could provide the authorities with his birth certificate and social security card to have him released. ICE claims he admitted to and signed paperwork stating he illegally entered the US from Mexico. Hermosillo signed something, but since he can’t read and can only write his name due to his learning disabilities, he had no idea what he was signing.
This is why due process is so important. To be clear, sometimes US citizens get caught up in immigration enforcement. According to a report from the US Government Accountability Office, from 2015 to 2020, 674 potential US citizens were arrested by ICE and 70 were removed (curiously enough, all those removals happened between 2017 and 2020). Due process is meant to ensure basic due diligence is done when impeding someone's rights. Sometimes, you get a false positive and you need checks in the system to make sure that gets sorted out.
Well, rest assured, that report is baby shit. It was the Trump V.1 trial run and now, he is looking to rearrange the government infrastructure in a way that ensures round 2 gets him into the big leagues, and DOGE is setting everything in place.
The Trump administration has been working hard to connect the data various government agencies have on you. In a March 28th memo, Troy Edgar, the deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security instructed staff to grant DOGE access to their data lake. This includes information for green card holders, those petitioning for one, folks with temporary protected status, asylum seekers, and DACA applicants. If a person touches the immigration process, DOGE has the data.
DOGE also has access to data at the Department of Health and Human Services (DHS). This houses data for Medicaid and Medicare but it also tracks unaccompanied minors that are released to sponsors in the country. This data isn’t just names. It’s biometric data of the children and the sponsors that take the minors in. This information sharing was initially started during Trump’s first term but Biden revoked it because the Trump admin was using it to go after the sponsors that took the children in.
DOGE also had a “Hackathon” recently at the IRS where they now have access to taxpayer names, addresses, and employment data to build out a massive API. The goal is to remove any data siloing currently happening in government. They are connecting the data from HHS and DHS in hopes to drive their deportation efforts into overdrive.
How will they use this information? However they can.
WIRED had a podcast recently that outlined how the government used drones, surveillance, and
social media to find criminals protesters. They have already used
AI to look through social media accounts of college students to find ones
they believe are sympathetic to Hamas after October 7th through a program
they call “Catch and Revoke”.
Several permanent residents and visa holders
have been swept up in this, but with access by connecting the databases at
the IRS, which houses a database specific for new hires, the HHS for quick
access to not just sponsors, but the immigrant parents of citizen
children, and DHS, they will be able to make a robust surveillance state
to either find– or financial lock out– anyone they want, not just
immigrants.
To be sure, they are acting like they are going after hardened criminals or antisemitic people, but those are only excuses used to give them the cover they need to prep the forts. When it’s set, their targets will broaden to whoever has caught their ire and it’s a horrible shame, because history has taught us over and over again that powers like this need to be constrained. Ensuring this data was compartmentalized is one of the many protections being bulldozed.
These siloes have been in place, purposely, by various laws used to limit government overreach, because even in the 70’s, Congress recognized potential abuses of power. The Privacy Act of 1974 was enacted to prohibit federal agencies from disclosing information about individuals without their consent and limited sharing across agencies outside of routine use exceptions or a law that specifically allowed for it. There were efforts to start a federal data bank as early as the 1950’s, but McCarthyism, and other government scandals, like Watergate, made the public very skeptical of the government having that much information in one place. That started the practice of siloing.
In 2014, Obama signed the Federal Information Security Modernization Act in response to an increase of cyber attacks. This formulated various protocols to assess risk and ensure confidentiality. One of the ways to limit risk and ensure confidentiality of an agency's data is to limit access to outsiders, even other government agencies. This also required certain measures for transparency, so when agencies were sharing data, there was clarity on what they accessed and for what purpose.
There are other domain specific laws like HIPAA, that protects health information, or the IRS Code 6103, with strict measures for accessing.
Even with these laws in place, there were agencies tasked with investigating complaints or reported concerns to ensure the law was complied with and civil rights were protected. This was largely handled by the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL), which Trump disbanded. So currently, if you think there is some form of government overreach, no one knows who to take those concerns to. This will work like Trump’s covid policy. Just don’t test for covid, and voilà, no covid. Disband the CRCL and voilà, no civil rights violations!
President Donald Trump acknowledges Kristi Noem, secretary of the
Department of Homeland Security, during a tariff announcement. Noem
recently shut down the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
Credit: Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg/Getty Images
While this system could be used in good ways, DOGE isn't really bringing the most trustworthy folks. By now, everyone has heard of BigBalls, or otherwise known by his government name of Edward Coristine. Outside of being a go-getter 19 year old, his prior business with China or the Russian domains he registered with his company Tesla.Sexy LLC would have been enough alone to likely get him nixed during government background checks required to get his level of access. His contact with others pegged for soliciting a cyberattack-for-hire services or his work with Path Network, where he was terminated for leaking proprietary information should surely exclude him from service, but no dice. He did briefly resign from DOGE after several racist comments he made were leaked, but the Vice President asked that he be hired back. Apparently, DEI now means white racists get to keep their government job.
Of course, there is even more concerning evidence of potential security breaches. A whistleblower came forward after he saw DOGE’s activity at the NLRB, where he worked. Generally, when people go poking around government data, because of Obama’s FISMA law, there are logging protocols that keep a record of where people go in the dataset, and actions taken within it. Except, he claims that DOGE folks turned all that off, and then 10 gigabytes of data was removed. This information included things like proprietary business information, union organizations, and unfair labor practice respondents. Then, there was an attempt from Russia to log into the data set. Whoever attempted to login had the correct credentials but since they were using a Russian IP, the system’s security measures in place because of FISMA blocked the login attempt (Thanks Obama!).
To be clear, there are ways for agencies to share data, especially for law enforcement. But to get access to it, the interested party has to convince a judge that the person in question probably committed a crime to obtain a warrant. And that process means law enforcement has to know what they are looking for and where to find it. If issued a warrant, then the scope of their search is limited to what they need. It can be annoying, but that kind of stuff protects people from being wrongly scooped up and ensures law enforcement has their shit together. It would mean less stories like Jose.
We are not witnessing innovation—we're watching infrastructure for selective punishment being built in real time. The question isn't whether it's legal. The question is: who will they come for next, and will anyone be left with the power—or permission—to say no? We don’t need to imagine how this ends—we’ve seen it before. What we haven’t seen is enough people willing to stop it.