Immigration and Customs Enforcement is deploying a new intelligence system called Investigative Case Management (ICM), created by Palantir Technologies, that will assist in President Donald Trump’s efforts to deport millions of immigrants from the United States.
In 2014, ICE awarded Palantir, the $20 billion data-mining firm founded by billionaire Trump advisor Peter Thiel, a $41 million contract to build and maintain ICM, according to government funding records. The system is scheduled to arrive at “final operating capacity” by September of this year. The documents identify Palantir’s ICM as “mission critical” to ICE, meaning that the agency will not be able to properly function without the program.
ICM funding documents analyzed by The Intercept make clear that the system is far from a passive administrator of ICE’s case flow. ICM allows ICE agents to access a vast “ecosystem” of data to facilitate immigration officials in both discovering targets and then creating and administering cases against them. The system provides its users access to intelligence platforms maintained by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and an array of other federal and private law enforcement entities. It can provide ICE agents access to information on a subject’s schooling, family relationships, employment information, phone records, immigration history, foreign exchange program status, personal connections, biometric traits, criminal records, and home and work addresses.
“What we have here is a growing network of interconnected databases that together are drawing in more and more information,” said Jay Stanley, a privacy expert at the American Civil Liberties Union. “If President Trump’s rhetoric on mass deportations is going to be turned into reality, then we’re going to see these tools turned in that direction, and these documents show that there are very powerful and intrusive tools that can be used toward that end.”
Although ICM appears to have been originally conceived for use by ICE’s office of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the system appears to be widely available to agents within ICE. Officers of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Office (ERO) — the U.S. government’s primary deportation force — access the system to gather information for both criminal and civil cases against immigrants, according to a June 2016 disclosure by the Department of Homeland Security, although ERO will use a separate system to manage its civil cases. “HSI and ERO personnel use the information in ICM to document and inform their criminal investigative activities and to support the criminal prosecutions arising from those investigations,” states the DHS filing. “ERO also uses ICM data to inform its civil cases.”
ICE’s Office of the Principal Legal Advisor also uses ICM to represent the office in “exclusion, deportation, and removal proceedings,” among other matters, according to the DHS disclosure.
The DHS disclosure states that Homeland Security Investigations is ICM’s primary user. Although mainly tasked with investigating serious cross-border crimes like drug smuggling, human trafficking, and child pornography, HSI had also been behind some of the most controversial workplace immigration raids of the Obama administration, which immigrant advocates fear could expand massively under President Trump. HSI provided support to the Enforcement and Removal Office during last month’s high-profile enforcement surge, and just last week it was reported that HSI agents spearheaded a controversial sweep of several Asian restaurants in Mississippi that led to the agency apprehending more than 50 immigrants.
The ICM documents offer a detailed reminder of the Obama-era push to upgrade and expand the federal government’s tools to track and deport immigrants. Obama not only presided over an unprecedented number of deportations; his administration also oversaw the pronounced expansion of intelligence systems aimed at the country’s immigrants. Now the sprawling immigrant surveillance apparatus that Obama enhanced is squarely in the hands of Donald Trump to assist in carrying out his promise to rapidly deport millions of immigrants.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement
The ICM documents also underscore the prominent role Palantir will likely play in assisting ICE in this mission.
Notably, two of the primary intelligence systems that ICM relies upon have also been also built or supported by Peter Thiel’s firm, according to the funding documents. One of these is ICE’s FALCON system, a database and analytical platform built by Palantir that HSI agents can use to track immigrants and crunch data on forms of cross-border criminal activity. According to the documents, ICM also provides its users access to U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s “Analytical Framework for Intelligence,” or AFI, a vast yet little-understood data system that Palantir played a largely secret-role in supporting. Some privacy advocates believe that AFI could be used to fuel Trump’s “extreme vetting” of those seeking to enter the country.
A slide from a 2014 ICE funding document outlining required data flows for the agency’s modernized Investigative Case Management system.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement
“When Trump uses the term ‘extreme vetting’, AFI is the black-box system of profiling algorithms that he’s talking about,” Edward Hasbrouck of the Identity Project, a civil liberties initiative, told me last year. “This is what extreme vetting means.”
ICM also provides its users with access to an internal system called the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), which “includes biographic and immigration status data related to individuals who are temporarily admitted to the United States as students or exchange visitors,” according to the DHS. Agents using ICM can also query ACRIMe, an extensive database operated by ERO that compiles data on immigrants in the United States. In addition, the funding documents state that ICM provides agents — through AFI — access to data gathered under the controversial National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, or NSEERS, the now-defunct Bush-era system requiring visa-holders from two-dozen predominately Muslim countries and North Korea to register with the federal government.
One funding document states that ICM provides agents with the ability to simultaneously search information on a given person across a diverse range of government databases, permitting, for an example, an address search to query “multiple documents throughout the system, such as the person subject record, financial data (interface), CBP crossing data (interface), and other HSI and CBP subject record types. The user shall be able to conduct a consolidated address search that will match on all addresses regardless of the record type.”
Although ICE’s enforcement focuses overwhelmingly on immigrants, the ICM funding documents make clear the intelligence tool can also be aimed at U.S. citizens. “Citizenship can be established a variety of ways to include biographical and biometric system checks,” one document states. “U.S. Citizens are still subject to criminal prosecution and thus are a part of ICM.”
The scope of ICM’s use appears to have expanded during the system’s development. The hundreds of pages of funding documents from 2014 make no mention whatsoever of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Office (ERO). On the contrary, the 2014 records state that ICM was launched as primarily an HSI initiative and meant for use by HSI agents. Yet by June of last year, this appears to have changed: The recent DHS privacy disclosure repeatedly states that ERO uses ICM to support aspects of its mission.
This is not the only case in which it has remained unclear what kind of limits ICE has on the sorts of missions for which its intelligence systems can be used.
A spokesperson for Palantir declined to provide comment for this story. ICE did not respond to a list of questions, including whether FALCON — ICE’s advanced intelligence and analytics system for Homeland Security Investigations — is also made available to ERO agents.
In February, ICE responded to a Freedom of Information Act Request asking for internal rules or restrictions on FALCON’s use by stating that no such documents existed, although ICE’s response also indicated the agency may have conducted an incomplete search for the records. The 2014 funding records indicate that ERO’s use of ICM — which provides its users access to Palantir’s FALCON — might also grant the deportation force access to FALCON.
Data sharing between federal agencies is often not governed by concrete legal regulations, according to Anil Kalhan, a professor at Drexel University’s Thomas R. Kline School of Law.
“Legislation after 9/11 authorized and encouraged information sharing within the executive branch,” Kalhan told the Intercept in December. “There is general authorization, and the scope and limits and constraints upon that authorization have not really been spelled out.”
The ICM documents appear to contain information about FALCON that is not otherwise publicly available. One funding document states that FALCON — and thus ICM — can link to a controversial law enforcement database called Black Asphalt, which is maintained by a private firm called Desert Snow and provides information to help police engage in civil and criminal asset forfeiture. Iowa and Kansas have prohibited the use of Black Asphalt by law enforcement agencies because of concerns that it “might not be a legal law enforcement tool,” according to the Washington Post. The funding documents also state that FALCON includes access to services provided by Cellebrite, an Israeli company that specializes in software used to breach cellphones.
With its full deployment arriving just in time for the Trump transition, ICM appears well positioned to respond to a new set of demands being placed on ICE by a president elected on promises of deporting immigrants en masse. The agency stipulated that Palantir must build a tool that can handle “no less than 10,000 users accessing the system at the same time” to search tens of millions of subject records.
A slide from a 2014 ICE funding document illustrating a day in the life of a Homeland Security Investigations special agent.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement
On May 8, 2014, in a meeting with representatives of firms vying to win the ICM contract, ICE screened a slide presentation to show just how ICM’s many users will be able to utilize the ICM system. The slides lay out a hypothetical scenario in which an ICE agent uses ICM to both interrogate a suspect at the border and then to shepherd the suspect’s case through court proceedings.
The first slide tells of a man named Jim Doe who attempted to enter the country by car but was stopped by CBP at the border and was discovered to be carrying contraband. So CBP calls in a square-jawed ICE HSI investigator, who immediately opens ICM and queries its data. This produces records on Doe’s vehicle, business dealings, prior arrests, and records detailing his prior crossings of the border.
Armed with this intelligence, the HSI agent then interrogates Doe and learns that he had brought the contraband across the border at the behest of a man Doe knows only by the nickname “Caliber,” who also has detailed discoverable information in ICM, which is able to reveal his true name of Calvin Clark by making connections based on a tattoo of Clark’s that is included in the system’s data.
Once the ICE agent has completed his ICM-backed investigation, he then uses ICM to create a case file. A subsequent chart shows the apparent final stage of ICM’s cradle-to-grave services represented in a graphic of a person clutching to prison bars with a caption reading: “justice is served.”
But the following slide points out that a conviction is not in fact the final step in ICM’s intelligence life cycle.
“Even once the case is closed,” the document states of the ICM record, “it is available for other agents to discover and link to future investigations, continuing the investigative cycle.”
Documents published with this article:
- ICE ICM Statement of Objectives
- ICE Investigative Case Management (ICM) Pre-Proposal
- ICE TECS Modernization Operational Requirements
- ICE TECS Modernization Master Plan
Top photo: A security contractor frisks a female immigration detainee from Honduras ahead of a deportation flight to San Pedro Sula, Honduras on February 28, 2013 in Mesa, Arizona.
Could the editors here correct the usage of the word “immigrant?” Someone who just hops over a border or overstays a visa is not an immigrant; he’s an invader. By continually using the word “immigrant” incorrectly, The Intercept is besmirching all the people who actually immigrated by applying for visas and complying with all the rules.
And look, I feel as sorry for the ‘dreamer’ children as anyone. But can we at least put the blame squarely where it belongs? On the irresponsible parents. Who in their right mind starts a family when that family could be easily ripped asunder because the parents could be deported at any minute? Who’s responsibility is that? The government that simply enforces its laws, or the irresponsible parent?
Frankly, by being so lenient on illegals, we’ve actually increased human misery by encouraging more to illegally settle here in the USA. If nothing else, the wall will send a big message that people shouldn’t even bother.
I fully support legal immigration, assuming the immigrant is willing to work and to assimilate. But invasion by one illegal at a time is simply outside of what a society of laws should accept.
1984…… is now reality.
What Trump attempts to do is what Obama did for 8 years except he did it on the quiet while Trump was loud and scary to hear that . I can understand where he comes from and Obama came from when Obama created the conditions and expanded the enforcement of the immigration laws. Talking to a friend, he said that may be the reason was the ever increasing national debt to run government at present time. Though before illegals were tolerated and supported for their hard enthusiasm to work. but now for some time the INS has being deporting as many as they can. Trump can’t wait for eleven million Mexicans deported thus he will create eleven millions for America.
Sweet,..finally a real Republican,.no RINO horn,.actually enforcing our laws,..beautiful thing to see!
The law is simple, the law is clear if you obey it there is nothing to fear:
All immigrants welcome to respectably apply at our front door just pay your fees and no trespassing please.
Foreign tourist and students welcome but do not expire or misuse your visas or with ICE you will get mired.
When a U.S. parent breaks a serious law in this nation it is sad their child is separated by their incarceration.
No different the pain an illegal immigrant passes to his family when our boarder he tresspasses.
Ok, would agree with you. So, please stop invading / bombing / manipulating / etc other countries. Leave Iraq, Syria, X, Y, Z.
concerns that it “might not be a legal law enforcement tool” Too funny.
Organized gang stalking is a real thing-now, with mind maps, and Palantir/NSA/CIA/InQtel. Tell me it isn’t. No, really- I dare you.
https://researchorganizedgangstalking.wordpress.com/2017/03/04/organized-gang-stalking-and-dhs-hsi-investigations-and-database-abuse/
Sounds effective…like we might be able to have a country with a border again. I have no sympathy for illegals. Catch and deport them. I don’t consider it my right to illegally enter foreign countries and squat there, and dump children into the schools. No one has the right to illegally enter my country. Period. Get out.
3 teen girls kidnapped by Salvadoran gang in Houston
Two MS-13 gang members from El Salvador, both in the United States illegally, held three teenage girls against their will and killed one of them in a satanic ritual, authorities in Houston said Friday.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/police-3-teen-girls-kidnapped-salvadoran-gang-houston-195556145.html
CULTURE CLASH
get’m out.
https://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_deep_states_hatred_of_trump_is_not_the_same_as_yours_20170302
I guess all this ‘spy’ stuff and ‘intel gathering’ would be okay if it were used on Republicans and Second Amendment supporters other than the ‘chosen’ ones of the left….Hmmm??
Consider this, Mexico’s economy is surging quite strongly and needs to stem flow of their most ambitious hardest workers and to recapture as many as they can.
U.S. benefits by implementing an expensive technology solution plus manhours, Mexico gets its best workers back.
Tell that to the citizen children of those people being deported. Find the kids at children’s shelters. Good luck with getting access to them because they are now or will become wards of the state.
Then again, that might be too much to expect of someone who is so solipsistic to not consider that families are being destroyed with the escalation of deportation and won’t use her real name.
No doubt it is gruesome in it’s enactment, just economics.
It may be harsh but necessary for the benefit of the children to separate them from their criminal parent. Breaking that chain of criminal family may be wiser than facing another generation of crime from people who can’t be deported.
This is infuriating and horrifying. Peter Thiel invites a direct comparison with Thomas Watson of IBM and IBM’s data role in the Nazi treatment of Jews and others. Even to the extent of adding punch-card columns to add more categories of data on a single punch card. This became the ubiquitous 80-column card which we all associated with business computer screens without realizing the origins in categorizing people for selection into approved and disproved people, at least I didn’t realize until Black’s book came out (sorry, I have the book somewhere but can’t remember the title or Mr. Black’s first name off hand). And although Watson later gave back the medal, Hitler awarded a medal to Watson for his contributions to the Reich and there are photos of Hitler with Watson. They were buddies then. And although the US made it illegal for US companies to profit with nations we were at war with, the monies for IBM were held until the end of the war when IBM just took up where they left off.
Peter Theil is every bit as vile. He really thinks his money is knowledge, wisdom and entitlement.
My thoughts exactly. IBM and the Nazis all over again.
Some Palantir engineers signed a pledge claiming they wouldn’t participate in this stuff: http://neveragain.tech/
Matthew Avant, Shanthanu Bhardwaj, Sarang Shah, where do you stand today?
There’s an urgent need for hackers and other freedom fighters to attack companies like Palantir and people like Peter Thiel with all instruments and methods that they can bring to bear.
LOL…
You first
meanwhile in Sveden…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4276942/Swedish-town-migrants-laugh-laws-despise.html
and in israel, they just knew they were going to need a wall, to shoot Palestinians from.
Ohhhh this is too rich…
All of this terrifying capability was intended for Queen Hillary to stomp out “domestic terrorists” (see: anyone who opposed the one-world theocracy).
Christ knows what Trump really believes in, perhaps not even he. But aside from a fear of brown people speaking foreign languages – he does not seem to have any guiding philosophy whatsoever.
Hillary, BOY did *SHE* have a philosophy. People engage in theatrical fear mongering over Trump can thank GOD himself that the world dodged Hillary Clinton.
There are a string of unpleasant adjective one could use to describe Trump – most of them unpleasant.
Only one horrifying adjective need describe Hillary: TRUE BELIEVER
In the Feb Sam Biddle Palantir post, a Palantir graphic suggests their UI could be connected to “DSD version, or maybe Special Forces”. The question is: how long will Palantir wait before they ask Trump for special access to the NSA’s domestic data trove? Will they be given access while remaining outside of federal oversight? Will Trump have access to this data? Thanks for staying on this story.
This kind of reporting is useful – but interpreting it politically may be difficult. There is actual philosophy involved.
It seems like the government has a very short slope between “having absolutely no idea who is in the country let alone who is supposed to be” and “tracking every time you listened to an NWA song and putting you on a police watchlist for it.” The big question is whether anybody can successfully draw the boundary between what is and isn’t a “legitimate law enforcement tool”. There are things like the Fourth Amendment, but they were drawn at a time when people imagined that the government was a sheriff and no all-seeing monopoly Company kept records of every broadband connection in a region.
In this case, potentially it seems like the government could do more or less “the right thing”. By the right thing… well, let me give an example I remember from a town I was living in – probably there’s one like this in the town you live in too. A company got more than a million dollars in tax breaks from a local government (think, “whore wars”) because they were going to open up a location with 500 jobs. A couple of years later it turns out that there were 500 jobs with 500 shifts occupied by 250 people … all illegals. Getting paid for just one shift each. It was all done through a moral condom, a “subcontractor” which quickly dissolved into vapor, so the company kept going, though I don’t know if it was able to survive paying minimum wage when there are others like that in the industry. Now if Palantir can access some basic employment records, track likely illegals, and figure out that 250 of them are working under two names at a firm near you, that might save your town a bundle in incentives when they go to pitch their expansion.
At the same time, there is no question that these programs can and are used for unconstitutional overreach. Even The Intercept rapidly glides over their use to track “child pornography” without raising an eyebrow. Few dare to question such a program. Nonetheless — what part of “Congress shall make no law…” does that not infringe? We know what bans on child porn do — they fuel a black market in the kidnapping and abuse of children. And they lead to prosecutions of tech geeks who run anonymous servers, people who dump Usenet sex feeds to their hard drives, even kids who sext with other kids their same age! The prosecutors stand by haughtily and say those kids are “victims of the internet”, but they are purely victims of unconstitutional policy. Let’s be clear here: even if some poor sap has a mental disease that makes it so he can only wank over pictures of little kids, I pity the poor bastard, and I don’t see any particular harm in letting him daydream. He just has to keep his hands off and stick to imagination. Which is where the rest of us stand where Taylor Kitsch or Radha Mitchell are concerned, so I don’t think that’s an impossible thing to ask. Whereas — once you ban child porn, it’s only a hop and a skip to going after Marine Le Pen for posting pictures of Foley getting beheaded by ISIS. I mean, what’s the difference, really? And if you go that far, you’re basically banning the awareness of reality under penalty of law. So we’re already near the bottom of the slippery slope, wading around in the muck, wondering how deep it goes.
My guess is we’re going to find out soon enough it goes pretty damn deep.
Well… If you do your history… Thiel is a monster of the CIA. Not Trump.
THIS IS ACTUALLY INTERESTING… WHY? CUZ NOW WE KNOW THAT THE GOVT FINANCED A SYSTEM TO “DEPORT ALIENS” OR PUT THEM IN FEMA CAMPS. THERE’S NO DIFFERENCE EXCEPT THE ALIENS WILL LIVE THE REST OF THEIR LIVES AS FREE MEN. FEMA CAMP DETAINEES ARE SLAVES UNDER REX-84 AND “CONTINUITY OF GOVERNMENT.”
THIEL, being loyal to his financial backers, doesn’t care who is in the White House. If Hitler or Mao were in the White House, he’ll be loyal to either one for a regular LARGE paycheck.
His handlers are at the Council on Foreign Relations (rebirthed from the Council on Foreign Plantations — from the 1700s and the British East India Company)
In fact… Ten years after its founding, Palantir’s chief executive Alex Karp — one of the firm’s co-founders with Thiel — agreed to perform a highly sophisticated and costly feat of data analysis for the Clinton Global Initiative, at no charge.
The task was to evaluate over 3,000 “commitments to action” made by nonprofits, corporations, unions, and other organizations at CGI’s annual meetings in New York City, hosted by its founder, former President Bill Clinton. Those commitments represent CGI’s central purpose, by transforming the typical conference on global problems, which usually began and ended with talk, into an opportunity for participants to act. To remain active in Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), every member must make a commitment, and those commitments must be “new, specific, and measurable” in their positive impact on a global problem.
You thought this was going to be used to collect escalating Obozocare dollars.
Do we get borders that define a nation? Jobs for U.S. citizens? Or is this passe?
It’s at least on the way to being passe. Nation states, especially giant nation states, aren’t going to work very well in world of perpetually-constrained energy and other resources.
Borders are going to be problematic — even more problematic — also.
Oh, piffle. Of all the things to complain about, “constrained energy” seems pretty low on the list. Do we hunch over books by the light of a lamp fueled with oil taken out of a cask from a storm-tossed ship that followed whales for season after season? Do we huddle around the wood burning stove for warmth and wear coats indoors all winter? Even gas, in absolute terms, is about as cheap as it was in the glory days of the hot rod. People may struggle under the burden of trying to maintain homes that are built too large and too well according to government edicts against the poor, but *energy* is the least of their problems. And in years to come — cheap solar everywhere.
Cornucopians are so cute. Deeply ignorant, and irrationally optimistic, but cute.
Shale Bubble
When You Wish Upon A Star
How does an entity whose entire history has consisted of one war of aggression after another, and whose borders have been created by a subset of those acts of aggression, get the right to have its claimed borders respected?
Our definition as a nation with a defendable Bill of Rights written to recognize the individual’s natural law rights, separates this experiment from everyone else’s. If you’ll defend the Constitution, and those Amendments to it. If you’ll protect the soil on which it’s practiced. “If you can keep it.”
The borderless administrative precincts of globalism let you experience an influential, effective vertical chain of command that offers the individual no recognition of natural law rights.
Name a single modern civilization that didn’t conquer someone else in order to occupy their land. I’ll wait…..
The Apache, Cherokee, and Sioux conquered and enslaved the Hopi, Pueblo, and other bands of Native Americans. It has gone on since humans first walked the earth. People like to forget that human history is inherently violent and that the side with the most advanced weapons and tactics almost always wins. Everyone acts like Colonialism is the first time it happened, when it has gone on for thousands of years.
Let’s be clear that these are databases of people, a lot of whom (most?) are not undocumented immigrants. There’s no automatic way for a computer to identify undocumented immigrants, plus someone who is undocumented is not likely in the system to begin with.
It’s as simple as applying for a drivers license in a New York or a California without accompanying documentation. The systems, or the systems watching the systems, understand that much.
From their previous association with HBGary, and their leaked emails, I’m not confident that their system won’t spit out a ton of false-positives. I pity the people that kind of mess lands on.
ICE is looking for documented criminal illegal aliens not immigrants. Conflating ,as you and others are doing, the non-criminals with these documented and known criminals is detrimental to the non-criminals.
Continuing to promote this protection racket for criminals may likely force the government to revert to rounding up any or all illegal aliens if that’s the only way to get to the criminals.
I really had no idea when I envisioned our Orwellian future, that we would be so well-informed about it’s creation. Thank you Spencer and The Intercept.
I feel this way also. Good reporting by TI and consistent, too. What other outlets do TI readers frequent? I like Truthdig, Jacobin, Democracy Now … of course I also look at MSM, from WaPo to Fox, just to see the spectacular idiocy.
This system may be built in the shadow of America’s fear of immigrants, but make no mistake, in the fullness of time it will be turned on us all. This system is not Republicans against Democrats or liberals against conservatives, it is the very essence of Big Government against us all.
Concur.
Yep. They control the media and are playing side A against B, bombarding each with unprecedented waves of propaganda on a now quarter-hourly basis. The goal is to derange America and divide A against B until they control ALL. I try to tell friends this, but the ones on the right are too racist and in love with a Chevrolet commercial image of America to listen, and the left too emotional and stupid.
Point to where sanctuary is. Where do those of us who actually see through all this hide and survive to wait this era out? This is the most important question of the era, the century, the HOUR.
don’t expect the drug cartel regional bosses and their network of lookouts, dealers, enforcers, mules, house mamas, and recruiters to volunteer information.
“A Palintir is a dangerous tool, Saruman. Who else may be watching?” Where is Gandalf when you need him?
Good news finally.
After decades and decades of politicians looking the other way, we finally have a president willing and ready to boot out the Illegal Aliens.
Let’s start today. No, make that yesterday.
No such thing as an “illegal alien”. There simply isn’t a legal definition for such a person. This is just hype and fear mongering you’ve succumbed to, friend.
The IRS website defines it quite clearly: “Illegal Alien,
also known as an ‘Undocumented Alien,’ is an alien who has entered the United States illegally and is deportable if apprehended, or an alien who entered the United States legally but who has fallen ‘out of status’ and is deportable.”
https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/immigration-terms-and-definitions-involving-aliens
Yes. And a problem is this: the current admin can simply refuse to reinstate someone who is a legal alien simply because they choose to do so – e.g. because of her beliefs. Falling ‘out of status’ can happen when it’s time to renew your green card and the admin chooses not to, for any reason. E.g. let’s say you did a minor offense, well normally (in recent years, both parties) this would not be an issue, and of course it shouldn’t be. Also, the law required that representation and court were in order. Now, the new reality means there is fear. All they need to do is make up some ‘alt facts’ about a legal immigrant.This way any legal immigrant in the country can be made deportable in a millisecond.
What gives the heirs of the European invaders who conquered, by means of the worst genocide in human history, the land now occupied by the United Snakes any right to say who can live in that land?
Power, if they choose to exercise it.
It’s a very thorough report. Even though I want to go crawl under a bush and die, I have to do the precise opposite.
Legal innovation is the way. If Pete Thiel’s machine is the new punchcard system for the 4th Reich, you have to decide if you are going to enable them with impotent liberal rage and complicity or legal innovation and a moral stick if they touch what really belongs to you. There are karmic and human consequences to this kind of crap. When they come for you I reccommend being ready with civil disobedience, a righteous consequence.
This will be used against Citizens like every other tool that is used against immigrants.
Yep, you’d better believe it.
Good. Having honest conversations about all the other issues we have to deal with (health care, education, minimum wage, jobs, environment) and immigration itself starts with having secure borders and a vastly minimized illegal alien population. Don’t just go after them, though. Go aggressively after businesses that exploit them. I am for immigration reform and more sensible rules for lower-income workers, but it needs to start from scratch, not with millions of exemptions.
Why do you think that’s not done? It seems simple enough: just slap some stiff fines on any corporation or wealthy person who knowingly hires undocumented immigrants. It’s probably more efficient, less costly and (if done right) more humanitarian than these deportation raids too.
Amen. If businesses were hit with heavy fines for employing illegals, that would be far more effective than a wall. After all, any business that knowingly hires illegals is breaking the law.
I doubt it would be that effective, because lots of unauthorized immigrants manage to complete what’s legally required to get hired.
The law for an employer is: the person being hired has to be able to provide the documents to complete an I-9, and those documents have to appear genuine. It’s a somewhat lengthy list of “one document from Column A plus one document from Column B”, but a driver’s license plus a social security card will meet the requirement.
Lots of people in the country illegally can get jobs by producing documents that meet the I-9 requirements, but they’re either using someone else’s documents or have fakes.
An employer can use a federal system called E-Verify to make sure that the Social Security number is real and matches the person’s name. An employer may do so, but isn’t required to do so by the federal government (except for some narrow requirements that federal contractors have to use it).
A few states mandate that all employers in the state use E-Verify. Illinois passed a law prohibiting employers in the state from using E-Verify, but the federal government sued Illinois and that law was struck down. California has a law prohibiting cities from mandating the use of E-Verify.
The federal government could pass a law to mandate that employers use E-Verify, but you’re kidding yourself if you think that wouldn’t be as big of political fight as the fights over things like deportations and sanctuary cities. And if you put in place harsh jail time and/or big fines for employers breaking the law, within a month there would be sad stories along the lines of an immigrant restaurant owner who is a legal citizen but got arrested for keeping his unauthorized immigrant cousin on the payroll.
There are definitely some people and companies who hire unauthorized immigrants without getting a valid I-9. But that’s certainly not anything like the only way that companies hire unauthorized immigrants. And certain individual hiring doesn’t even require an I-9: something like a house cleaner or lawn care person who comes by once a month can be an independent contractor, no I-9 required.
And I don’t see why this solution would be any more humane than deportations. You’d have people still here illegally who now just have a tougher time finding a job but could probably still find a job doing something, either off-the-books or working as an independent contractor to cut lawns or clean houses. And if they did leave back to Mexico, you’d still have stories about grade school kids who are U.S. citizens needing to go back to Mexico with their parents who weren’t here legally.
TLDR: some employers hire unauthorized immigrants illegally, but a lot fully comply with the law as it stands today. Changing the law and enforcing it would be a political fight and would result in a mess that’s not any more “humane” than deportations.
The “knowingly” part of that is pretty tough to establish, because people present fake or borrowed documents that meet the legal requirement to get hired.
The penalties now go up to criminal penalties of a fine of $3,000 per worker and up to 6 months in prison for anyone who makes a “pattern or practice” of hiring unauthorized immigrants.
Read something like this legal overview: http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/legal-pitfalls-hiring-undocumented-immigrants.html
I’d love to see the screeching that would happen if, upon seeing a cop arresting someone on the street, you searched for an “identifier” of his (car #, badge #) and got his personal financial information, names of relatives, where he went to school.
Go write a protest song.
Go watch a Chevy commercial designed and tailored to win your coal miner money by flashing US flags, welder sparks and blonde women’s titties.
And I’m a conservative saying this. One of these days, too late, you’ll realize both of our sides have been had, YOU FOOL.
“With its full deployment arriving just in time for the Trump transition,”
Yes, this program was put in place during the OBAMA admin. And he is just as guilty as trump.
Spencer you aren’t following Intercept publishing guidelines. This sentence should read:
“In 2014, Obama awarded Palantir, the $20 billion data-mining firm founded by billionaire Trump advisor Peter Thiel, a $41 million contract .”
If your headline says Palantir is helping Trump, why omit Obama’s name when reporting the actual contract? Why are you using agency names when describing bad things Obama did and forgoing agency names describing Trump’s future misdeeds.
This article is doublethink. Obama awarded contracts to Palantir and presided over ICE and their three million deportations. Yet the author wants to blame Obama’s contractual relationship with Palantir on a president who has been in office only a little more than a month.
Jamie,
Gotta keep the liberal false narrative alive, at all costs.
Anything which in any way, weakens the false narrative must be carefully massaged and manipulated, lest the unwitting liberal acolytes begin to sense a disturbing undercurrent, which if not properly dealt with will expose the liberal agenda, which in a nutshell, is to maintain the decades long policy of incrementalism, the drive to keep the poor and the middle-class in economic slavery and penury.
The coastal liberal elites are currently in a state of shock, refusing to accept the fact that the undercurrent became a torrent that may carry them into oblivion.
Concur..this business didn’t start with Trump! Sheesh..what a joke..
Intercept has some redeeming value with informative reports but it is pretty obvious they stain their journalism with subtle hate with anything to do with Trump. Intercept is fundamentally journ-O-lism.
It’s a well known fact where the intelligence community’s political believes are – they are serving their own interests first. Decisions on procurement are made by agencies. What politics are implemented with the tools ist the political component. Trump is letting the Rottweiler off the leach.