How Student Protesters and Immigrants Became Targets of Trump’s Surveillance Tech

“Catch and revoke” — the phrase sounds like something from a dystopian thriller, but it’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s very real characterization of the Trump administration’s new one-strike visa cancellation policy targeting foreign students. A State Department spokesperson said that “full social media vetting” will be used for visa interviews and will be ongoing while the student remains in the U.S. for studies.

On this week’s episode of The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks to anthropologist Sophia Goodfriend and Chris Gelardi, a reporter for New York Focus investigating surveillance and the criminal legal system. They unpack how AI and surveillance technology are being weaponized to silence dissent on American campuses and fuel the deportations of immigrants nationwide.

“In the past few months, as we see the expansion of government surveillance, the crackdown of ICE on both legal residents and undocumented people in this country, we see these technologies lending a veneer of algorithmic efficiency to increasingly draconian policies,” says Goodfriend.

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The effort is powered by more companies than most people realize. “To enforce all of that and to bolster those efforts are a host of different kinds of both small AI startups, of data brokers, of large tech conglomerates like Meta, OpenAI, Palantir, and the like. So it is really this kind of enormous dragnet of surveillance that’s bolstered by the tech industry that’s increasingly aligned with the Trump administration,” she says.

But this surveillance machine extends well beyond university campuses. The same technologies are being deployed against immigrant communities across the country.

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This means every digital footprint becomes potential evidence for deportation proceedings. Social media posts, location data, facial recognition from community events, and even routine traffic stops feed into massive databases. Gelardi explains that one of the more concerning sources of information comes from state police gang databases, which are rife with mistakes. “I think all evidence suggests that these are very under-regulated and that they operate in a way where they’re really ripe for garbage data and inaccuracies,” he says. He cites some gang databases that had children under 5 listed.

Gelardi explains that local law enforcement enters names into state databases that feed to the national crime information center run by the FBI. Law enforcement at all levels — local, state, and federal — can access it on their phones. “Anything that the state police funnels to the feds is immediately available to pretty much any ICE agent,” he says.

To understand more about the tech infrastructure powering deportations and what this digital crackdown means for everyone, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.