‘Who’s behind ICE?’ Forum explains how tech companies profit from ICE operations

Tucson, Arizona – Community organizers in Tucson brought people together on Monday to learn about how the government uses technology to surveil its residents, part of a new monthly series that intends to educate and mobilize communities.

About 30 people filled a room at Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson and listened as Jacinta Gonzalez joined via video call to talk about how tech companies are profiting off mass deportation and detention of migrants. The presentation titled “Who’s Behind ICE?” covered how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) obtains data from tech corporations and uses it to identify and detain migrants. 

The event was the first in a monthly series titled “Unraveling State Abuse,” where organizers will bring in experts to talk about what state violence looks like and how everyday individuals can resist it through organizing. The event coordinators want people to feel empowered, to take action, said Dugan Meyer, a geographer and photographer whose research focuses on how technology and police power shape social landscapes. 

“The goal is to educate each other on what's happening,” Meyer said. “And create spaces in which we can discuss the strategies to oppose this kind of violence in the communities.”

It’s why organizers, among them the Abuse Documentation Committee, Defensa Resistencia Group and Coalición de Derechos Humanos based in Tucson, invited Gonzalez to speak. 

Gonzalez is the head of programs for Media Justice. This organization challenges how corporations and governments use technology by analyzing how that technology enables harmful policies and amplifying community-led alternatives to surveillance. Before working with Media Justice, she helped launch #NoTechForICE, a campaign that uncovers which companies are working with federal, local and international government agencies and profiting off of surveilling people without their consent. 

At Monday’s event, Gonzalez explained how data broker companies sell data to government entities like ICE, how tech companies analyze the data and create files of people and how companies use data centers to store that information. All of these companies have lucrative contracts with government agencies and benefit from increased ICE operations, she said. 

Gonzalez specifically listed Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis as the two major companies that buy and sell personal data, including people’s addresses, license plate information and phone numbers, among other details.

Palantir, which is building a surveillance platform for ICE for $30 million, is another company Gonzalez warned about. The surveillance platform will help track immigrants for deportation. Palantir sorts through the data and organizes it into files, assisting government agencies in criminal investigations — for example, in what ICE calls workplace raids, Gonzalez said. 

“Some folks might remember, under the first Trump administration, there was a huge, huge raid in a poultry plant in the southeast of the United States, [almost] 700 families were picked up,” Gonzalez said, referring to the 2019 raids in Mississippi. “Palantir Technologies were used, for example, in the processing of information and tips that led to that raid.”

Data centers are also making money off increased surveillance. Amazon’s data centers store data for these companies, Gonzalez said. She applauded the Tucson residents who fought to prevent an Amazon Web Services data center from being built southeast of Tucson. 

Project Blue, proposed by Beale Infrastructure and whose end user would have been Amazon Web Services, was a proposed data center southeast of Tucson. Tucsonans organized quickly against the project and showed up en masse to community town halls and city council meetings. Experts on water conservation, healthcare, environment and activism weighed in and loudly opposed the proposal. 

The Tucson City Council rejected it in early August after council members voted unanimously to stop negotiating with Beale and not annex the land where the data center was proposed. The annexation was required in order for the company to use Tucson water and Tucson Electric Power to run the facility. 

“I just want to celebrate the amazing organizing that happened in Tucson that led to such a beautiful, beautiful victory last week,” Gonzalez said as the crowd cheered.

People in the audience asked Gonzalez what they should demand of government leaders to regulate data sharing. 

“How can we have a conversation on how to protect ourselves with what’s already there?” one woman asked. 

Gonzalez said organizers have worked with federal agencies in the past, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Communications Commission, to look at ways to regulate data brokers. 

Community organizers are also examining the existing contracts between police departments and local governments with these tech companies, demanding that these contracts be either terminated or that guardrails be established to close loopholes that allow local agencies to share information, she said. 

“The data they can't share is data they don't have,” Gonzalez said. “So we have to be really, really vigilant at the local level with what kind of surveillance technology is being set up.” 

With ICE obtaining more funds, technology companies are selling their services, especially artificial intelligence, as something efficient, she said.

“So what happens when the purpose of the agency is cruelty?” she said. “What happens when you make cruelty more efficient? What happens when you make this type of violence system more efficient? It just means that it's going to come up more intensely, and so we are going to have to be observing and watching and reporting to each other what this system starts to look like as we're thinking through what our strategies are.”

Gonzalez also gave the group a list of actionable steps they can take as they learn more about technology’s role in immigration enforcement and other systems of policing: 

• Ensure Project Blue doesn’t have a comeback and that the city council establishes strong guardrails against future data centers. 

• Recognize that data infrastructure is linked to the harm caused by surveillance to individuals, as well as to the environment and local economy. 

• Organize local defense networks against ICE. Look into what contracts the local police budget has.

• Join the national fight against these bigger companies.

“You know, companies like Amazon, companies like Palantir think they're too big to fail,” she said. “But I think what y'all have shown them in Tucson, and I think we hope to continue to do so at a national level, is so that no matter where they go, there's going to be organized communities that are going to fight against them.”

The first event was planned somewhat rushed, as organizers thought they would still be fighting the approval of Project Blue in Tucson, Meyer said. The city initially planned to vote on annexation on Aug. 19.

In the upcoming September event, Meyer intends to inform community members about which surveillance technologies are already being used in Southern Arizona.

Stephanie Casanova is an independent journalist from Tucson, Arizona, covering community stories for 10 years. She is passionate about narrative, in-depth storytelling that is inclusive and reflects the diversity of the communities she covers. She recently covered the criminal justice beat at Signal Cleveland, where she shed light on injustices and inequities in the criminal legal system and centered the experiences of justice-involved individuals, both victims and people who go through the system and their impacted loved ones.