A critical but little-discussed evolution is occurring amid our national debate over immigration enforcement and ICE tactics. As Americans rely on video to document abuses and atrocities, they should not lose sight of the fact that communities are being pushed to adopt tools and habits of surveillance to defend themselves against a government that has already embraced them.
In the short term, cameras are protecting people. But over the long run, the Trump administration is forcing us to build a cage of our own making.
Over the long run, the Trump administration is forcing us to build a cage of our own making.
Over the past year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has expanded far beyond traditional enforcement methods. The agency, which received a $75 billion funding boost with the Big Beautiful Bill Act alone, has expanded its reliance on real-time biometric identification and mass data access. Agents deploy facial-recognition tools, mobile biometric verification apps and license plate reader systems. In addition to monitoring social media, officers have access to platforms that link state and federal databases. Identification that once required time, paperwork or judicial approval occurs in seconds. Technological capacities for targeting individuals — whether in street encounters, courthouse arrests or elsewhere — have massively advanced even as the legal framework around immigration enforcement has barely changed.
Moreover, the detention of U.S. citizens and other aggressive actions suggest authorities are willing to abuse power to suppress Americans’ fundamental rights, regardless of an individual’s immigration status. Trump border czar Tom Homan bragged recently that the administration would “create a database” to target ICE protesters — going well beyond the purview of immigration enforcement to monitor American citizens who dare dissent.
Meanwhile, in reaction to instances of state violence from the killing of George Floyd to the fatal shooting of Renee Good, Americans now default to documenting law enforcement actions. When a self-employed software engineer recently posted a call for dashcams to support ICE monitoring efforts, some 500 showed up on his suburban Minneapolis porch. Minnesotans’ rapid-response networks have not only recorded ICE operations, livestreaming arrests and tracking agents’ locations, but also exposed agents’ brutality to the rest of the nation.
Even when constant documentation is justified, the transformation of recording into a survival strategy reshapes how society understands public life.
To many, these counter-surveillance efforts feel essential to protect public safety and fundamental rights, especially when federal officials promote narratives at odds with proliferating cellphone videos. They’re also encouraged by some local and state authorities, such as when Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz instructed constituents, “If you see ICE agents in your neighborhood, take out that phone and hit record. Help us create a database of the atrocities … to bank evidence for future prosecution.”
But even when constant documentation is justified, the transformation of recording into a survival strategy reshapes how society understands public life. Every viral video, livestreamed arrest or crowdsourced map expands the mass-surveillance landscape in the United States. Our phones become both a shield and a monitor. Protection merges with data production, and resistance begins to resemble a corollary tech-driven surveillance infrastructure: crafted by humans, often with good intentions, but also accessible to courts, law enforcement and the Big Tech oligarchy to boot.
This is not an argument that people should stop recording ICE activity. But anyone primed to point their cellphone camera should be mindful of how often what begins out of temporary necessity becomes permanent. Documentation deters abuse and creates evidence when institutions fail. It has saved real people from disappearing into a system that often operates without meaningful transparency, whether wrongly detained citizens or erroneously deported immigrants.
Still, we should be clear-eyed about the position society is being forced into. A democracy depends not only on formal rights but also on practical limits. The growing, and mutual, hyper-surveillance carried out by the state and the public is eroding the last dregs of Americans’ privacy.
To be clear, responsibility for this spiral does not lie with neighbors holding phones outside courthouses or whistle-blowing volunteers warning of nearby agents. It lies with an enforcement regime that has made surveillance the price of safety — not from some undocumented boogeyman but from the state’s increasing authoritarian violence.
The likely progression of such entrenched surveillance poses a clear threat to fundamental American values.
The likely progression of such entrenched surveillance poses a clear threat to fundamental American values. It becomes ever easier to see how formal rights guaranteed by our legal systems and institutions will be realized only if and when they can be proven on video or with some sort of data. Justice then becomes conditional on bandwidth, battery life and the willingness of strangers to jump into monitoring mode.
A surveillance state does not usually announce itself with sweeping laws or dramatic speeches. More often, it grows through narrow justifications, technical upgrades and the gradual normalization of nonstop monitoring. And that is what is happening both because of and in response to the large-scale ICE abuses taking place across the country.
If surveillance becomes the default language between the state and the public, then the argument will eventually be over who watches more carefully, not whether anyone should be watched at all. And a country where safety and freedom are offered only to those with proof is no democracy at all.
