Why Palantir's ImmigrationOS Endangers Democracy and the Rule of Law

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What if the most consequential immigration policy decisions in America aren't being made by elected officials, or even by government agencies — but by software? Right now, a sprawling ecosystem of private technology vendors is quietly reshaping who gets flagged, detained, and deported in the United States. At the center of it is Palantir's ImmigrationOS, a platform for end-to-end automated enforcement. But it’s just one piece of a much larger machine.

Today we’ll hear from the authors of a new law review article that argues that private tech vendors have become a third governing power in American immigration — sitting between the federal government and the states, encoding policy into code, and building infrastructure that increasingly poses a threat to democracy and the rule of law:

• Chinmayi Sharma, an associate professor at Fordham Law School who is also affiliated with the Strauss Center at University of Texas, the Atlantic Council Cyber Statecraft Initiative, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology, and the Center for AI and Digital Policy.
• Sam Adler, a third year law student at Fordham Law School.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Chinmayi Sharma:

My name's Chinmayi Sharma. I am an associate professor of law at Fordham Law School.

Sam Adler:

Hi, I'm Sam Adler. I'm a 3L at Fordham Law School.

Justin Hendrix:

And you are the authors of this draft law review paper, “Immigration Enforcement Intermediaries.” We're going to talk about this today. You say at the heart of the federal government's new immigration enforcement engine is Palantir's ImmigrationOS. This is relatively new, something that was procured by ICE in April 2025. You call it a central hub for a sprawling mass surveillance apparatus and apparatus built atop myriad public and private data streams and private sector technologies. I'll step back just a moment before we get into the details of this thing and ask you to talk a little bit about the context in which it was developed and procured.

You say that immigration enforcement in the US has long been recast as a national security project more militant than humane and capacious in the authorities it claims. But you talk about the kind of status quo that has existed, this kind of bilateral federalism between states and the federal government. What is that status quo you think with regard to the way that we think about doing immigration enforcement in the US?

Chinmayi Sharma:

I think at a very high level, this sounds maybe too simple or straightforward to even seem like an insight, but the executive branch at the federal level simply cannot accomplish all of its agenda nationally given the size and diversity and complexity of the country. And so, to have immigration enforcement since the beginning of the country and the relationship between states and the federal government, there had to have been some cooperation, some reliance on state cooperation to carry out the executive's agenda. In terms of manpower and information, the executive branch just never had as much manpower or information as they needed to do what they wanted to do.

And so, there is a long history of them requesting information from states that have better insight into their own constituents, what's happening within their borders, and then also relying on the cooperation of the public officials that work within states to either conduct searches, to provide information, to keep an eye out for particular individuals that are of interest to the federal government. And the background relationship is not one directional. It can't just be that the executive branch says, "We have this agenda and states have to help us carry it out." There's a constitutional principle that says the executive branch cannot coerce, co-opt.

They cannot force states into doing their bidding because there is that sort of sense of separate sovereignty. And so, states could cooperate. They did not always have to cooperate. They could not get in the way of the executive branch doing what is constitutionally allowed to do, but there's a lot of space in between there. You can't hinder the project and you don't have to wholesale cooperate. And so, what we saw is the power balance has shifted over time. It ebbs and flows, but it tends to be in favor of the executive branch in the past many, many decades. But generally states had the opportunity to say, "We will help with this.

We will give you this information. We will not give you that information. We will pass along information when we have a suspect that we consider that we think is also violating immigration law, but we are not going to proactively evaluate whether or not everyone we are looking at from a state level might be in violation of immigration law." So, there was a negotiation there, and it's because the executive branch relied on states for cooperation.

Justin Hendrix:

And you say that that is now breaking down, that effectively there's a structural change going on, and part of that's driven by tech and access to data across many data sets.

Sam Adler:

So, essentially, if we're thinking about this bilateral relationship as Professor Sharma laid out, before you had this informal or sometimes more explicit cooperation between the state and local actors and the federal government. And within that, there was the ability to resist actively helping or providing that information. So, in the sanctuary city context, which a lot of folks are familiar with, New York City, for example, is a sanctuary city and would just refuse to provide information to the federal government on immigrants within the city.

But as you sort of have all of these private vendors, especially a lot of folks talk about what we refer to as the leaky sanctuary problem that data brokers facilitate, which is now you have all of these private technology companies or data brokers that are able to circumvent these localities or these states. And in some ways, we like to think of it as taking away some of their autonomy and how they negotiate that relationship with the federal government because now there's no longer this sort of requirement to go through this sort of bilateral or formal channels between the federal government and state and local governments.

You could sort of circumvent that either by, in some cases, there's a lot of reporting on buying data from Thomson Reuters to clear or a lot of attention has been focused on these flock ALPR contracts. And as we've seen recently, a lot of these state and local governments are realizing that when they're contracting with these companies, they're losing autonomy and how they negotiate that relationship.

So, you're seeing a lot of backlash amongst these state and local or even city councils that are now actively trying to cancel all of their, or pause all of their flock or other ALPR contracts because they're starting to realize that there is this circumvention of how they decide from a policy matter, how they want to interact with the federal government and to what degree they want to have autonomy on their participation with the federal government's immigration enforcement policies.

Chinmayi Sharma:

I think to add on to just what Sam said, because he mentioned Flock, and I think that it's a great example of this. There's so many parts to the story here. You have the federal government and states, but in the article, we actually talk about subfederal entities because it's not just states, but it's also counties, localities, even like HOA. You have groups with authority at many levels that have information and the federal government wants that information. And so, once upon a time, it was just maybe, is this individual somebody that might've violated immigration law?

Now, if you want to prioritize target resources for the most charitable interpretation of what an administration might want to do and all the way down the line to realistic, but pernicious, egregious goals that administration might have, the more information you have, the more you are able to build profiles, dossiers. And so, it's not just what is in the hands of governments, but also what's in the hands of utilities companies like gym memberships, grocery stores, social media accounts. And Flock is an interesting example because it's used in what seems like a very banal way. It's a license plate reader.

And so, when those contracts were made before there was such robust reporting about this, nobody saw that as overreach government surveillance. I have E-ZPass. But now once a jurisdiction becomes so dependent on a technology that they have a contract with, that they use, that they rely on, they've gotten very used to, they might have laid off the human workforce and reallocated resources, you become very dependent on it.

And so, even going outside the federal government, state level, we're seeing, I think there's one example in Troy, New York where you're seeing between the mayor and law enforcement and city councils, how the constituents of that area through their city council representatives say that we do not want to renew our license with Flock. And they did not renew it. And then I believe what happened is that the mayor announced that there was an emergency state and used that power to keep flock cameras online and said that this is necessary for the continued functioning of the city. There's misinformation here. We are not sharing this information with ICE.

And so, that sort of tension is now outside of the realm of just the federal, state government. It's happening everywhere and it's because of how sophisticated the technology's marketing is and then how dependent we grow the longer we have it.

Justin Hendrix:

There's a phrase in here you use, you talk about the idea of the plumbing without the flow. I've used a similar phrase before, probably on this podcast, thinking about the extent to which we've been laying the plumbing for authoritarianism. So, it seems like what you're saying is that's sort of what's happened. In some cases, communities maybe with some legitimate ends in mind, we want to stop speeding or manage potholes, do various other things, but we've put in the plumbing for authoritarianism and now it's flowing.

Chinmayi Sharma:

Absolutely. Interoperability is a word that is just, it's not sexy and it's hard to get people excited about it, but I think it's at the crux of what is so scary about the laying of the pipes here because once you build out the infrastructure that can both generate this data and move it seamlessly across systems so that it becomes useful to all of the entities involved in that architecture, then you have made it functionally... I mean, it's like toothpaste back into the tube. You have made it impossible in a practical sense and in a technological sense and in a policy sense and in a legal sense to be able to then shut down those data flows.

And that's what's scary here is like, yes, there is such a legitimate story of why technology can improve public governance, can even be rights enabling if you are improving backlogs, if you are making things more efficient, if you're using translation services. But if, for example, I'm using as an individual translation services to get access to benefits, I now have a system that might've been procured by a government that is collecting my communications for the purposes of translation, but that information is kept somewhere. And the way this infrastructure works is it is an easy task at this point to then draw that into this whole ecosystem that's been built.

Justin Hendrix:

I wanted to pick up on that word interoperability in particular because you spend some time talking about that, the idea that this is actually a competitive advantage for vendors in this space. I think often when we talk about interoperability as something that may preserve some separation to some extent between different companies or different vendors, it makes them able to take advantage of the same information. But what you sort of describe here, what I come away thinking, I suppose, is that we are piecemealing our way to something that looks like a centralized system, a much more top-down command and control structure that flows directly to the White House.

Sam Adler:

I agree. Interoperability, you normally think that's a way to sort of democratize, for lack of a better word, these sort of environments such that there isn't someone who or provider that's coming in and creating barriers to where they're working. I think in this case, interoperability is really something that is benefiting the top down or the command and control surveillance state here because it needs to be able to run and function. It's really a game of maximizing the amount of information flows you have coming in, but also those information flows need to be able to be flow into interoperable into these databases and have similar data file formats to be able to actually take all of this data and operationalize it for these sort of authoritarian purposes.

And so, what you're seeing in all of these contracts is like, it's not reading between the lines. It's something that the federal government is specifically putting into these contracts and particularly with the purpose of, we need you to have these sort of requirements such that we can feed or plug this into what we sort of talked about at the beginning, but this hub and spoke system.

I think this is the best analogy that we were able to come up with, which is you have all of these vendors and really what ImmigrationOS is coming in to maybe solve is not the better word, but to sort of serve the purpose of is being that hub, which you can attach all of these sort of spokes to and funnel this information so that you can leverage it for whatever WIM or executive policy they want to target it towards. And so, Palantir has made a living on structuring data. They'll publicly say, "We are not a surveillance company because we don't actually collect data."

And while that might be true, what they do is take all of this collective data and operationalize it for surveillance purposes, even if they're not the ones on the ground collecting that data. And so, I think really what this sort of interoperability is doing is allowing for this dragnet surveillance at all of these different junctures in everyday life. And really what a lot of these vendors are doing is just having a particular area that they are able to collect high quality data in and contributing that. And so, there isn't some massive competition barrier going up where there's one vendor who is able to supply all of this data and shut people out of the market.

There's just a plethora of these companies that are just filling different niches within all of these areas like, I mean ALPR, contracts, companies that are just scraping social media, like you can go on and on to all of these points in which in your everyday life you're having these points of contact and there's going to be a company that is filling that particular space and then funneling it and making sure that they can have whatever they're extracting from human life be put into a database that can be meshed and sort of analyzed along with all of these other data points.

Because as Professor Sharma said before, this is about creating usable dossiers, and I think that's really what the end goal is here.

Chinmayi Sharma:

I just wanted to add to the irony of the story of interoperability in this unique context. I've written a lot about calling for more interoperability. And like as Sam said, the idea is you prevent corporate choke points, you prevent Facebook or I guess the artists formerly known as Facebook now Meta from having exclusive control over either the data or the technologies, which means like the ecosystems, like this idea of walled gardens. And so, by opening up the door and saying like, "You have to be compatible with these other parties, you allow competitors to crop up and engage in this ecosystem."

And in that context, we think that's great because we're allowing for new startups, we're allowing for a diversity of technologies and innovation, and maybe you'll have some options that are more privacy preserving, some that are not, and that's great. We like the proliferation of this. When we have that interoperability in this context, what it means is the major entity that we are concerned about is not a corporate entity, it's the government.

And when we have this idea that any new entity can crop up and plug and play into this system, what that means is that entity, new startup A, that is collecting some new surveillance sort of information, has an incentive to grow, has an incentive to plug into this system to enjoy the network benefits of being part of this bigger thing, the government gets the benefit of that new entity. If that entity decides, "I am no longer okay with the way I'm being used," the power of saying, "I no longer want to interoperate," is so weak because there are so many other entities that will crop up to replace them.

I am embarrassingly prone to using Greek mythology references in my writing, but we referenced the Hydra of you cut off one head and three more will crop up in its place. So, any one private sector entity's moment of conscientiousness of, I'm no longer going to engage in this, interoperability has built resilience in the government's ecosystem. And so, in terms of choke points, these companies are not able to cut off access anymore in a meaningful way. Now, there might be one exception, which is Palantir.

Right now, the government has come outright and said in its procurement documents, and I think there's a several billion dollar procurement policy shift recently specifically about Palantir, that the policy shift is, again, an unsexy procurement policy shift, but it allows DHS to be able to fast track contracts with Palantir under the logic that no other company can offer what Palantir can for the government's purposes. And so, then you say, well, what if one day Palantir grows a conscience and says, "We no longer want to engage with the federal government on these issues.

We're the hub." So, actually the interoperability begins and ends with us. There's nothing to interoperate if we are not serving the function of, as Sam said, bringing all these data streams together and operationalizing it. And then I think that's where the anthropic case becomes relevant. And it's two things that I don't think people are talking about in parallel, but now all of a sudden, because this is under the auspices of national security authorities, the government has potentially legal abilities to prevent the biggest player here from saying, "We no longer want to cooperate."

Justin Hendrix:

And of course, Palantir was at the center of the Anthropic Pentagon dispute and questions around mass surveillance run right through all of that. I do want to just ask you a little bit about what you see being taken away here. And we've talked about the idea that the plumbing was laid for this situation, the kind of technical legal infrastructural ground was set. Then Palantir introduces ImmigrationOS and you clearly regard this as a kind of step change as an indication that we're in a different age now. What's being lost? What will no longer happen with regard to deliberation over how we do immigration enforcement in this country?

Chinmayi Sharma:

I'm so glad you asked that and asked it in that way because the next paper I'm writing is specifically about what is it that automation is doing in the executive branch and how is that fundamentally changing democracy and the rule of law? And those are such abstract concepts. But I think when you're confronting a reality that is so serious and so scary, I think we are so prone to pussyfutter around it and not want to call it out for what it is. But I think this is an enormous landscape shift when the executive branch has said upfront exactly what it is doing, which is we are automating for efficiency. We're going to rely on one vendor because they can do it the best.

So, we're going to gain economies of scale. We are bypassing resistance states and localities that are preventing us from doing our mission, and we don't want to have to wait for these cumbersome processes. So, we're streamlining all of this so that we can respond to on the-ground realities quickly. And what all of that means is once you have this infrastructure in place, we do not have the friction of public interaction, deliberation, having to share any amount of information such that the media will get it, we'll do more investigate reporting on it, we'll share it with the public, the public will form an opinion on it, then it'll get messy, it'll get your inviting friction.

And now when you just have to shift systems, this happens through contracts and code updates, and that is not something that we see. And once you have fewer and fewer civil servant or public officials that are part of that process, now we have, like you said, command and control top down, the White House and Palantir employees, and obviously the rest of the ecosystem that's working on this.

And so, we've lost the many, many layers of what we think of as the entire purpose of a Democratic Republic, which is individuals that carry with them the ethos of public service representing either directly or because of their employment is to serve a public service function, being a part of this, at least seeing the information, being able to raise dissent to what they think is wrong, to notify inspector generals, at least when they used to exist, to share this information or cooperate with Congress, to even leak it or whistleblow it. Almost everything we've learned, the scariest stuff that we've learned about immigration enforcement today has been through unauthorized leaks and whistleblowers.

And the shift is those people are about to be irrelevant. They're about to be automated out of this whole process.

Sam Adler:

I think a lot of people talk about, whether it's AI or automation, that these sort of technologies are like consent engines in the sense that they provide this neutral or justified reason for conducting certain activities. So, they can take something that is just pure policy driven things and provide some veneer of objectivity or reasonability to action.

And so, I think one of the things that is coming out of this is, along with ImmigrationOS, there's been a lot of reporting on Elite and that's sort of seen as use case for ImmigrationOS and using this dashboard to then decide what neighborhoods you're going to target based off of information that you're extracting from these ecosystems or going up and refusing in many cases to see someone's birth certificate or government ID because actually Mobile Fortify is what we use. And if Mobile Fortify says X, your birth certificate says Y, we're actually going to use what Mobile Fortify is telling you.

And so, really what these are doing is shifting us into an environment where you can sort of engage in authoritarian enforcement activities while also stepping back and saying that this objective scientific sort of reasoning, you can sort of point to technology and say that this isn't us just arbitrarily doing it, this is us using sort of like data analytics or these sort of like devices which are far more objective than humans making decisions. I mean, this is often in just the pure policing technology environment. There's a lot of discussion about how these police chiefs are saying like, you know what, we're going to use these policing technologies because a lot of folks say that we're engaging in discriminatory policing.

And so, actually if we use these policing technologies and we point to that, it's, well, how could the policing technology be discriminatory because it's not these humans doing it with human biases, it's this like objective technological tool. And so, I think what's lost is that you're sort of having the same clearly systemic issues while also being able to wrap it in the veneer of objectivity. And so, one of the examples that we gave, which is like a pretty harrowing example from 2017, so this was sort of during the national vending enterprise era, was that they just decided, ICE decided to change the parameters of their detention tool overnight without anyone telling anyone, they just changed it.

And the reporting that eventually came out well after they had done this was like they rigged the system to ensure that more people would be detained and not be able to be released. And so, all of a sudden, to Professor Sharma's point, when you're able to sort of unilaterally make decisions in the code base of these systems that has these massive effects on human liberty and rights with no degree of democratic input, then we're sort of in this sort of like very quick sort of trajectory of democratic backsliding where we're just aligning democratic oversight in these enormous sort of public policy systems.

Justin Hendrix:

You also make the argument here that it's not just lawmakers, other policymakers, the public are effectively being kind of pushed out of the process, but the courts are also being sidelined. Let's talk a little bit about that. What in particular defangs the courts in this process?

Chinmayi Sharma:

The courts are always such a complicated story and I guess I'll say there is defanging of the courts happening, but unfortunately the courts have also abdicated a role in a lot of this because of doctrine that has developed even long before Trump won. And to be clear, it is a harrowing state of affairs that we see today because of this administration, but what this pipeline story started happening long before the Trump administrations, including under Democratic administration. So, I want to make sure that we allocate some responsibility to everyone who might deserve it.

But in the legal context, the big shift that happened... Well, first of all, as a legal scholar, this is maybe too reductive of a way for me to put it, but we historically have never believed that immigrants get the same lockstep constitutional rights that US citizens do. That's just kind of an unequivocal fact of the way doctrine's been interpreted, not in necessarily evil ways. This is somewhat true in many nation states around the world. We've just interpreted our constitutional rights and obligations differently when it comes to individuals who are temporarily in the states permanently, but not US citizens or US citizens. Different rights are allocated to different entities.

Where it went further though is once the story around immigration changed to be a national security story, it wasn't just about quotas for immigrants that are allowed within the borders based on our sense of resources. That's just the dawn of time. It's like, how many people can we add? It stopped being that around nine eleven shifted a lot of law in a lot of different ways, and we started to think of immigration as basically synonymous with a national security mission. The concern about immigration focused almost solely on mitigating threats to the country and public safety in terms of how the narrative built and policy was developed.

And that means that once we are doing things under the executives' national security authorities, that is the area where the executive has the broadest scope of discretion. In immigration and far beyond, when it comes to national security, courts are extremely hesitant to step in and curtail what the executive wants to do. And that's just kind of like a fundamental premise of sovereignty of the sovereigns powers are most vast when they're outside of the batteries of our territoriality. And so, that means in those cases, the courts have said, we are not going to second guess the subjective motivations that might be happening here.

We are not going to add in owner's restrictions the way we would if this was happening in the interior or in the non-immigration context, because we think that's going to hinder what the executive can do in this extremely important national security context. So, that's, I think, the doctrine kind of self-defanging. Now what's happening is once you have private entities, all of a sudden you're going to have often very successful arguments that we cannot disclose these proprietary algorithms even in court and litigation because that compromises valuable trade secrets. And so, it can be the defense to producing certain kinds of evidence that you are concerned about trade secrets.

Then you also have the added benefit of private companies in litigation, even if the government's not necessarily involved in the litigation, can get the benefit of, "This is a national security related issue and the government would not want us to share X, Y, and Z piece of information." Then you have the fact that even if they were producing something, a lot of what they're producing is not particularly discernible in a way that a court can make doctrine around it. And then there's various kinds of immunities that you can get as a contractor. That's still a very, very fast developing and still murky area of law.

And on top of that, going all the way to the first instance, when this is all happening through contracts and these contracts are done through technical legality, they're not contracting in an illegal way, are those downstream decisions that a system makes, are those challengable decisions or do you have to go all the way back upstream to say somehow the contract was invalid? So, it becomes very complicated. So, the combination of the courts are very hesitant to step in and then should they step in, immigrants have had a hard time from a practical standpoint and from a procedural standpoint, even getting access to courts.

And then there's the fact that companies have many, many different tools in their toolkits to say, we're not going to be perfectly cooperative in this litigation.

Justin Hendrix:

With a few minutes we have left, I want to just get into a few of the reforms you suggest. You have a couple of different routes. You've got state and local procurement reforms. We're seeing calls for that across the country. Whistleblower protections, ideas about how to confer data, subject rights, autonomy. What would each of you focus on if you had the opportunity to go out and talk to state and local leaders or even to the general public about things that should be done to potentially create reform in this area? What would you advise?

Sam Adler:

I think something that has been theoretically talked about, Professor Akayla Marr, I believe coined this concept or this term in the '80s. And this was around the time of Bivens, which has been basically cut back doctrinally into being almost ineffectual. This idea of Converse 1983 actions. I think that you're seeing a lot of states go to this solution or realize that this is something they can do. There's a lot of movement there. Illinois just passed a bill, which was basically the Illinois Bivens Act. And then quickly, because we're invoking Bivens, basically Bivens was this idea that you could bring constitutional torts against federal actors.

So, oftentimes we're talking about constitutional torts for Fourth Amendment violations. And in the prison context, there's often eighth amendment violations. And so, this idea of Converse 1983 is the ability to bring violations of your federal constitutional rights through state tort causes of action. And so, I think this is something that a lot of states are looking at. I think that there's a lot of discussion that needs to be had about the parameters on which you can do this. We briefly mentioned in the Illinois case, they write into their bill that you can bring constitutional torts based off of the violation of your federal constitutional rights, but also your Illinois state constitutional rights.

It's very unlikely given intergovernmental immunity doctrines and other such sort of areas where there's these barriers to the way in which states can sue or interfere with federal actors. It's unlikely that you're going to be able to get state constitutional remedies for state constitutional violations. But I think this is something that… Vermont's talking about this. A lot of states are looking at it. And I think that's a way for folks to be able to see more action, at least on the foot soldiers of this automated enforcement environment, which is these ICE officials or in some cases deputized local police officers.

So, I think that's something that would be enormous and have reverberating civil rights effects beyond the immigration context if we sort of have states turn to these causes of action.

Justin Hendrix:

And Chinmayi, what about you? What would you recommend?

Chinmayi Sharma:

Since I get to talk to you and hopefully people listening to this that aren't just nerdy legal scholars beholden to the way we write journal articles, I'm going to go, I guess, a little bit beyond what we do in the article and say, I think this is the time and there has to be a place to have the much higher level, deeply uncomfortable, politically unmarketable conversations around just acknowledging we have made the wrong risk calculus when it comes to these systems. The reforms that we suggest are the ones that we think are to some degree viable and legally defensible.

And by that, I mean the things that I would want, I have sometimes facetiously, but increasingly getting not facetious, just said, I don't know why we have data brokers, but that's not a legally defensible right now suggestion because there's a lot of law happening around the First Amendment that would make something like banning data brokers an impossible task. That being said, theoretically the life of a country is long and this issue isn't going away. And we can't continue to play the policy whack-a-mole of, yes, we're going to collect all of this information and we're going to keep all of this information, but we're going to on a case-by-case basis determine who gets it and what they get to use it for.

I don't think there's any shortage of evidence that we are doing that unsuccessfully. We can have the best policies, but our article cites to reporting by the Washington Post for media, which just does excellent reporting in this space, that even if you have a sanctuary city, you are reliant on the compliance of the entities within your sanctuary city and we're having lots of law enforcement bypass sanctuary city restrictions and send information to ICE agents anyway. So, the question is that the right risk calculus?

Is having this honeypot of an inordinate amount of information about a citizenry, about all of the people within a particular area, something that is worth the benefits we're getting from the technology because I do not have faith that use case restrictions. I think that's something that we have to do now and continue to do into the future, but I don't think that as a long-term solution, that's going to be sufficiently protective to the people that get exploited by this.

Justin Hendrix:

I mentioned that this article is a draft and that you're inviting feedback. So, my last question is, have you had feedback? Anything you're going to consider incorporating into the final product down the line?

Sam Adler:

Professor Jessica Bulman-Pozen at Columbia provided a lot of information or feedback on intergovernmental immunity doctrine and how it bears on some of our solutions. And I'm not sure if I want to, at this stage of the podcast, explain or walk through into governmental immunity, but it's extremely fascinating in terms of the way in which at the state and local level, you can have targeted regulation or action towards interfering with ICE operations. So, in the procurement context, I'll just give one example that we're pointing to because a lot of this is being litigated.

There's a local airstrip that this sort of local government, this airstrip was being used by ICE where there are chartering flights to deport individuals. And this locality was firmly against this and decided that they were going to pass the equivalent of a local ordinance or regulation that prevented any of the organizations, like the people who fuel planes at this local airstrip, et cetera, from providing services to these flights. This gets appealed all the way up to the Ninth Circuit and it's deemed that you're actually interfering with federal operations and that's been violation of intergovernmental immunity, which is sort of like a subdoctrine of the supremacy clause, and therefore you can't do that.

And so, I think one of the really fascinating things that we're going to be thinking through, especially as we really want to do some more development of our solution section is how can we find ways to work around all of these barriers that is set in place to be able to preserve or prevent intervention with all of these sort of horrifying policies that the federal government is perpetrating, such that they won't eventually be successfully rebuffed in court. And so, figuring out a way to work around these doctrines and provide state and local governments with firmly footed in terms of legal doctrine, if this goes to court, things that they can do and successfully challenge.

Chinmayi Sharma:

As a law professor, I am often, I have the blinders on that I don't even realize they're on of what is legally defensible right now, but it was talking with and working with Emily Tucker and the Center for Georgetown Center for Privacy and Technology where it's something that a lawyer would chafe against, but forced me to think, if not now, then when are we having these conversations that are extra legal that are like, sure, there's law as it is today, but what's right and what's wrong? And those conversations have to happen.

And that was feedback we got from her and the center on this paper, which I still think there is an important role if you're talking about actionable in the near term next steps, but that is why I'm glad that there are simultaneously smart people having the conversations about this might not be law we can put into effect tomorrow and defend against challenge, but what's the future we want?

Justin Hendrix:

This paper's called “Immigration Enforcement Intermediaries,” and you can find a link to it in the show notes. Chinmayi Sharma, Sam Adler, thank you very much for joining me.

Chinmayi Sharma:

Thanks for having us, Justin. It's always great to talk to you.

Sam Adler:

Thank you.