On June 5, CBS News reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests under the second Trump administration topped 100,000. That auspicious figure, combined with increases in the daily arrest rate, suggest that ICE is getting closer to a goal set by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who wants the agency to achieve a minimum of 3,000 arrests per day. A separate analysis of arrest figures by The New York Times published last week suggests the administration is on path to achieving that target, with arrest rates climbing in every state.

In addition to stepped up raids by masked agents, these figures have been achieved through the use of various forms of surveillance technology, including the unprecedented combination of federal datasets and new analytics from private sector firms, expanded social media monitoring, and investments in biometric recognition. But even as today’s raids prompt terror in immigrant communities and protests across American cities, the administration’s deportation program is only set to expand as the 2026 Republican budget advances with massive increases in spending on immigration enforcement, including for new surveillance technologies.

The looming rapid expansion of federal surveillance may signal a step change on a trajectory set in motion after September 11, 2001, with broad implications for the rights and privacy of all Americans. At this juncture, it is important to project where these trends may lead in the near term and to grapple with how extensive or invasive surveillance could become if left unchecked.

Building the “everything database”

The current form of the Republican budget bill commits as much as $175 billion to enforce President Trump’s anti-immigration agenda. While the final number will depend on reconciliation between the chambers of Congress, the next budget will almost certainly include billions of dollars for administration priorities, such as new technological capabilities for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and ICE.

Emily Tucker, executive director at the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown University, warns that it appears DHS is in the early stages of building an “everything database.” Signs of this are apparent in new federal contracts and procurement notices. According to one request for information, ICE is seeking contractors that can conduct

…data extractions to identify unusual trends, data anomalies, and control breakdowns, identifying possible trends, patterns, and links to automate methods for detecting, monitoring analyzing, summarizing and graphically representing patterns of relationships between entities, identifying potentially criminal and fraudulent behavior before crime and fraud can materialize, and detecting and reporting elements of crimes involving the exploitation or attempts to exploit the immigration and customs laws of the United States (emphasis added).

DHS is already buying sensitive corporate data on individual purchases and movements, such as airline data; it is now seeking the ability to unify and analyze this trove of information. The government is expected to add other sources of federal data, such as social security and tax information on citizens and noncitizens alike. A March 2025 Trump executive order directs the government to remove “unnecessary” barriers to data sharing and access between departments and to “ensure the Federal Government has unfettered access to comprehensive data from all State programs that receive Federal funding, including, as appropriate, data generated by those programs but maintained in third-party databases.”

Nicole Schneidman, who leads Protect Democracy’s technology & data governance team, says the federal grab for state data is dangerous and unprecedented. “States have much more granular data on all of us, [and] states themselves have never aggregated this data,” she explained in an interview. Once federal data has been combined with sources like local school districts or state-administered social programs, she warns, the potential use cases for surveillance expand dramatically: “When you aggregate data, the number of use cases becomes exponentially larger… [we] are never going to be able to come up with the list of all the different ways that especially aggregated data could be deployed for,” she said.

What’s worse, decisions made on the basis of this data could be inscrutable for purposes of due process. Rachel Levinson-Waldman, managing director for liberty and national security at the Brennan Center for Justice, says we are already seeing a “policing kind of automated data fusion and AI-enabled analytics tools” and should expect these tools to become a major factor over the coming months. As AI analytics are layered into the federal stack, she says, it may become “very difficult to unwind” the reason for law enforcement actions against individuals.

Paromita Shah, executive director of the nonprofit Just Futures Law, is concerned that efforts by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to collect and combine data across agencies with little process or transparency may make it difficult to determine whether the law is being followed. “Because they have been arguing that their work is not subject to government oversight, we expect that they are breaking privacy and confidentiality protocols to share data and create lists of people who they will target for deportation and surveillance,” she told Tech Policy Press.

An expanding circle of surveillance and reprisal

Immigrant communities will feel the immediate weight of this surveillance engine. As a consequence, Greg Nojeim—director of the Center for Democracy & Technology’s security and surveillance project—predicts that undocumented residents will be more reluctant to provide information to the government. “What non-citizen is going to file a tax return if they know that doing so could lead to their removal from the United States? It’s just not going to happen.”

As a result, the level of fear that has already made individuals worried about going to church, school, and work will increase further. Immigrants and their children may lose access to important benefits, and undocumented people may avoid interacting with the legal immigration process even if they otherwise intended to do so. Levinson-Waldman warns that public safety could suffer if undocumented people become less likely to report crime to the police. “That really expands the opportunities for wrongdoers to prey on many more people,” she explained. “The impacts that we will see especially elevated within immigrant communities… will not stay just within immigrant communities.”

Tucker agrees that these are the most immediate likely consequences of widening US government surveillance, but she does not expect things to stop there. “Already, it’s a mistake to think of this as immigration enforcement… I’m definitely not trying to minimize the fact that the people who feel the impact of this most are [from] immigrant communities,” she explained; rather, the administration is starting with immigration because “that legal framework is the one with the least oversight and accountability” owing to the “extreme deference” that other institutions typically give the federal executive’s immigration and national security powers.

Tucker expects the administration to take advantage of legal and technical opportunities to expand its immigration-based surveillance power to other areas. Shah agreed, saying that “we know from experience that immigrants are the laboratory for federal agencies experimenting with new technologies… We fully anticipate that this will extend to US citizens and others – and not only for law enforcement but for health, employment, and education.”

Schneidman’s analysis is similar. She said she has “no doubt that what we see in immigrant communities is basically the pilot of a strategy that could easily be deployed… against those who are expressing dissent and protest,” especially because “the data that is being collected right now isn’t limited to the people who are non-citizens in this country.” For example, she explained, in the context of federal requests for state data related to the SNAP program (short for “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), “what is being requested from states is that they effectively turn over data on anyone who has received or applied for SNAP since 2020. That is overwhelming data on low income families who are American citizens.” Schneidman also referenced an incident from 2018, when the first Trump administration kept dossiers on US journalists who crossed the southern border to report on a migrant caravan which the president had made a campaign issue. Many were detained and interrogated as they reentered the country.

That is only one example of how immigration enforcement inevitably impacts US citizens. Another comes from a 2022 report produced by the center Tucker directs, titled “American Dragnet.” It found that ICE had already scanned the driver’s license data of one in three adults and could locate millions more based on utility bills, license plate readers, and other sources. And that was before the infusion of new resources and data.

As the impact of the government’s beefed up surveillance apparatus becomes apparent, Tucker and Schneidman warn that free expression and association will suffer. “Everybody will come to expect that everything they do, whether it’s online, whether it’s out in the world, is comprehensively surveilled,” said Tucker. “You need a space of privacy to build a movement, and the increasing impossibility, or at least the feeling of impossibility of that, is going to be a huge impediment to fighting back.”

Levinson-Waldman predicted even more direct consequences, especially given the administration’s use of social media surveillance. “I have a real fear that we are going to start to see all of that information used in ways we haven’t considered before… Things like denying someone the ability to incorporate as a small business or denying someone the access to a Section 8 voucher, access to a loan, access to mortgage credit, all of the things we largely take for granted while living in a bureaucratic state… [the processes] that allow us to live our lives and have children, buy a house, start a business, even declare bankruptcy [or] pay our taxes,” she said.

Potential violence on the horizon

If, as Tucker and Schneidman explain, immigration enforcement is a petri dish for the federal government’s surveillance power, what will happen when it escapes containment?

“The big picture is that the US does not have a broad privacy statute,” said CDT’s Nojeim. “The golden rule of privacy… is that information collected for one purpose can’t be repurposed without permission. We don’t have that rule.” Instead, Nojeim explained, the US has a “sectoral approach” which is weakest in areas related to law enforcement access. “We’re at a point in the march forward of technology,” he said, where ”more human thought than ever in the history of mankind is becoming available to the government without the need for a warrant or court permission. Where that goes depends entirely on the goodwill of professionals who enforce vague laws that have been designed intentionally to give them flexibility in emergencies. Unfortunately, those laws are being exploited by the Administration, which is making false claims about emergency [and] national security risk.”

Levinson-Waldman likewise cautioned that observers should no longer expect officials at the federal, state, and local levels to make a good faith effort to play by the rules. “There still has been a feeling that the government is bounded by some basic obligations… and that people in those positions [are] making an effort to keep their work [and] the agency’s work within the four corners of what it’s supposed to be doing... I think what we're starting to see now, and one of the things that concerns me most, is just a real erosion of even those baseline assumptions,” she said.

Could state officials limit the use of state data for the federal panopticon? Tucker and Schneidman both pointed to things states could do, like pass laws around how data is labeled, stored, and managed by third-party vendors; the industry of data brokers which collects and sells commercial data on individuals could also be better regulated by state governments. Schneidman called these kinds of rules a “longstanding opportunity” to prevent intrusive data requests by the federal government under past administrations headed by presidents of both parties.

Unfortunately, states have largely punted on this opportunity over the past decade. “It’s possible,” said Tucker, “but finding the political will may be difficult.” And ultimately, she believes that truly unwinding a panopticon more than two decades in the making will require even harder asks of political leaders. “What is most needed,” she said, “is for people to take up the very unsexy problem of undoing a lot of what we have built as far as… the digital infrastructure put in place without any democratic contestation, through procurement or corporate fiat.”

But Shah expects DHS to expand dramatically over the next three years. “It operates without an internal civil rights agency,” she said. “It will double in size and resources under this administration. Imagine what a domestic paramilitary agency of their size can do with these types of technologies.”

Tucker believes that the more likely outcome is dwindling institutional resistance in the face of relentless federal aggression. “People are rightly terrified,” she said. “Trump has already threatened to criminally prosecute state and local officials who don’t follow his orders, no matter how illegal they are, when it comes to cooperating with ICE and CBP…. I think that if we have a hope of resistance, it’s going to have to come from communities. It’s going to have to take the form of organized grassroots response. And I don’t feel optimistic about the possibility of that grassroots uprising being met with diplomacy. I expect it would be met with force.”

Signs of what to expect emerged last month in Los Angeles, the day after ICE achieved its first 100,000 arrests of the second Trump administration, On June 6, 2025, ICE raided businesses in Los Angeles’s garment district. They were met with resistance: protesters threw eggs. Agents responded with pepper spray and nonlethal munitions. ICE agents were accused of inciting unrest by firing tear gas into crowds stuck in traffic. Stun munitions started fires. Protesters lit automated vehicles ablaze to block federal movements. Trump called up the California National Guard over the Governor’s objections—then he sent in 700 Marines. Trump and Stephen Miller floated the word “insurrection,” as if a trial balloon for federalizing law enforcement under the Insurrection Act of 1807.

“I think the line between paramilitary, intelligence gathering, and policing is disappearing,” said Shah. “When that happens, you are heading towards an autocratic government.”