Maurizio Guerrero Prism
Abetted by surveillance tools created by a power-hungry tech oligarchy, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is laying the groundwork for an authoritarian state that is dismantling rights beyond immigration and fundamentally changing democratic norms, according to advocates. This poses a major danger to society at large, the advocates warn, especially for critics of the Trump administration.
“What is built in the name of controlling migrants increasingly becomes a tool for monitoring society as a whole,” said a new report by multiple advocacy groups. “DHS has laid the foundation for this authoritarian moment.”
DHS oversees both Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection. Its tech surveillance tentacles, which include biometric databases, social media monitoring, location tracking, license plate readers, facial recognition, mobile phone extraction, drones, and AI-powered analytics, “extend far beyond the border and far beyond immigration enforcement,” stated the report, issued on June 23 by the nonprofits Mijente, Just Futures Law, and Surveillance Resistance Lab.
“This administration is supercharging surveillance in an unprecedented way,” Don Bell, policy counsel at the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, said in an email to Prism.
Contracts awarded for immigration enforcement to 11 of the most prominent tech surveillance corporations doubled in value in 2025, according to the report’s analysis of federal awards information. In just the first four months of 2026, contracts surpassed the previous year’s total by 65%.
“From the expansion of facial recognition technology to buying Americans’ data from third-party data brokers and building tools of mass surveillance for ICE, we’re witnessing an intense assault on our foundational Fourth Amendment rights,” Bell said.
The Fourth Amendment protects people from unreasonable government searches and seizures of their persons, homes, papers, and effects. Legal experts consider that mass surveillance without a warrant routinely tramples this constitutional right.
The exponential growth of surveillance is especially concerning because the Trump administration is going after “domestic terrorists,” defined as people or organizations whose views include “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” or “anti-Christianity,” as well as “anarchists” or individuals espousing “extreme transgender ideologies,” according to official documents from the White House and federal authorities.
Antifa—loosely understood as individuals who confront neo-Nazis—was designated by the Trump administration last September as a domestic terrorist organization, a category usually reserved for foreign groups. Most experts, however, say antifa is not a specific group or movement.
On June 23, a federal court in Texas sentenced eight people to a collective 450 years in prison, with all but one convicted of terrorism charges in relation to a protest outside the Prairieland Detention Center near Dallas. Authorities labeled them as the North Texas antifa cell. One individual who shot and wounded a police officer was sentenced to 100 years in prison, while his co-defendants in the protest received 50-year sentences. An additional individual, who did not even attend the protest, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for concealing documents: moving boxes of anti-fascist pamphlets.
“What we’re experiencing now is an escalation of repression under a new war on terror,” said Mizue Aizeki, director of the nonprofit Surveillance Resistance Lab, during a June 29 webinar held by the organizations that authored the report. “This includes the highly politicized Department of Justice acting as DHS’s lawyer, alongside an unprecedented federal investment in growing the police state.”
Advocates view the Prairieland Detention Center case as a chilling precedent. In mid-June, federal prosecutors in Minnesota charged 15 alleged members of antifa with impeding the Trump administration’s January immigration crackdown in the Twin Cities. The demonstrators are accused of conspiring against the federal government by blocking access to federal buildings and hurling chunks of ice at official vehicles.
“The president has emboldened ICE with new, supercharged surveillance capabilities and billions in additional funding, which encourages them to brazenly act as a weaponized political force against American citizens,” Nicole Schneidman, tech counsel and policy strategist at the nonprofit Protect Democracy, said in an email to Prism. “This is a textbook authoritarian tactic that tries to make the idea of showing up, speaking out, or organizing feel dangerous for Americans.”
The tech oligarchy’s influence
Central to the increasingly authoritarian state is the tech oligarchy, a group of extremely wealthy and powerful technology executives, investors, and corporations shaping AI, cloud computing, digital infrastructure, and data extraction and analytics. Tech oligarchs are not only key contractors for immigration enforcement, but they also have largely captured the administration, according to advocates.
“Corporate executives are embedded within and influencing government in ways that give them substantial power in terms of visioning and directing the security state and the war machine,” said Aizeki.
The most visible of these individuals is Elon Musk, one of President Donald Trump’s top donors, who led the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which reportedly oversaw the creation of “a master database” at DHS to link information from federal agencies, such as the Social Security Administration and the IRS, to support immigration enforcement actions.
DOGE “worked to break down firewalls between government data sets,” Aizeki said, “massively expanding the surveillance power of the state.”
Another well-known tech oligarch is Peter Thiel, co-founder of the data analytics corporation Palantir—reportedly in charge of creating the master database—and a major funder of Vice President JD Vance’s political career. At least three top federal officials are part of Thiel’s network, according to the report: Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg, U.S. Federal Chief Information Officer Gregory Barbaccia, and Michael Kratsios, science adviser to the president.
Other tech oligarchs embedded in the administration, according to the report: David Sacks, a tech investor and co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology; Marc Andreessen, a tech investor and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, involved in staffing for DOGE; and Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril Industries, which developed an AI-powered operating system that fuses data from thousands of sensors, enabling a small number of operators to control swarms of drones and towers, for now mostly deployed at the southern U.S. border. Former Anduril employee Antoine McCord is now DHS’s Chief Information Officer, overseeing the largest biometric database in the U.S. government.
These oligarchs are building a massive surveillance apparatus, purportedly for immigration enforcement, that advocates say has been weaponized to dismantle fundamental democratic rights, including the states’ protections of voter registration records.
In 2025, the Justice Department launched a sweeping effort to demand highly sensitive voter information—including birth dates, partial Social Security numbers, and driver’s license numbers—from nearly every state. The information would be shared with DHS to identify noncitizens, even though noncitizen voting is practically nonexistent.
“The administration is trying to intimidate people, but what we have seen in places like Minneapolis and Chicago is that we don’t have to let their scare tactics work,” Schneidman said.
Editorial Team:
Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor
Maurizio Guerrero is a journalist based in New York City who covers immigration, social justice issues, Latin America, and the United Nations. Follow him on Bluesky at @mauriziogro.bsky.social and on X at @mauriziogro.
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