What should we do today?
How would you write Data Borders differently today?
But what can I do?
People often ask me these questions when I present my research on my book, Data Borders: How Silicon Valley is Building an Industry Around Immigrants (Villa-Nicholas 2023), which examines the growing industry of data collection for the surveillance and control of immigrants in the United States. These questions arise in undergraduate and graduate classrooms, at academic conferences, and among public workers in the United States. I respond by advocating for policy protections for immigrant information rights, providing examples of data rights activism, and demonstrating how we are applying techno-imagined futures within my Southern California community to advocate for humane shifts in technological design and data collection.
Image 1: Data Borders book cover (UC Press, 2023)
The growing industry between the U.S. government and private technological industries around immigrant data surveillance is so large and so lucrative, and we often feel so small in comparison. My book prioritizes the experiences of Latinx immigrants with surveillance technologies in the borderlands. I name these ‘data borders’ with qualitative data from people who came across the U.S.-Mexico border’s experiences with surveillance technologies.
But still, these questions follow me. In this blog, I would like to explore a little further the state of Data Borders, describe some of the key factors that make up this phenomenon, and reflect on the book three years after its release, when people in the United States are experiencing a surge in interactions and media exposure with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). I have termed this current phenomenon the “data body milieu.” “Data body milieu” is this emerging state of borderland surveillance that brings all residents into an intimate place where our data lives together, defines us in digital borderlands, and places Latinx immigrant data at the center of technological innovation and development. The data body milieu, then, comprises social media data, library databases, and the DMV database (to name a few), working together to construct a borderland for surveillance and deportation. It is that sense that your information is somehow linked to the massive surveillance project happening with ICE.
Over the last year, during Donald J. Trump’s second term as the 47th President, we have seen the public implementation of these technologies. Contracts between Big Tech and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE have increased and been implemented publicly; for example, the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that ICE uses a Palantir Tool, named the Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE), that draws on Medicaid Data. Palantir Technologies, founded in 2003, is one of many Silicon Valley commercial-defense tech company hybrids that contract with ICE to develop dystopic surveillance technology.
So, what do we do? I want to revisit some takeaways from my research on this topic and reflect on the past year of intensifying ICE investment and presence.
Meet the New Boss…
While the 47th Presidential administration is resolute in its determination to invest heavily in ICE and Border Patrol, the current dystopic public interface with ICE could not have been implemented so rapidly, albeit haphazardly, without context. There has been a long-established history of investment into border and immigrant surveillance and technologies in what Ana Muñiz, professor of crimonology, law and society at UC Irvine, builds on as bordering, the process in which the border is always in formation: “It is curious that the definition is unfinished, though perhaps appropriate, as the construction of both the border and its people is an ongoing political project” (Muñiz 2022, 3).
ICE and Border Patrol, then, enter our public awareness with a long track record of awareness among undocumented people. They are an outward reminder of a long-scaffolded history of investments, policy, and politics that create the infrastructure of the masked agency we are intimately experiencing today. While masked men and unmarked cars have become familiar through social media circulation and visual culture in present-day iterations of immigration enforcement, this recalls that borderlands and immigration policy have long been built around such forms of citizenship exclusion.
A Latinx Paradox
When I interviewed people who had been in detention centers for crossing the border without documentation, one of the patterns was the disrespect Latinx immigrants felt from Latinx border patrol agents who worked to deport and detain people (with shared histories, origins, and cultures) crossing along the California border. It served as a resonant warning about Latinxs who work for Border Patrol/ICE from undocumented people, and as a foreshadowing of what was to come.
When it comes to Border Patrol and ICE, there is a high representation of Latinxs, with nearly 30% of ICE agents and about 50% of Border Patrol agents employed being Latinx as recently as 2020 (Murillo 2020). Cities around my hometown in Riverside County, California, exhibit a strong investment in recruiting Latinx individuals through advertising. Billboards advertise the high recruitment fees for well-paid Border Patrol jobs in the area. Riverside County is heavily Latinx and marred by Border Patrol checkpoints, detention centers, and Border Patrol vehicles planted on freeways, serving as reminders that there is always a detention and deportation process and presence nearby.
Among the media and scholarly discussion of surveillance, detention, and deportation, and the Silicon Valley relationship to ICE, and among the Latinx demographic, we need to come to terms with the fact that Latinx immigrants are heavily focused on as targets and a large facet of Latinxs in the U.S. also support and participate in ICE activity (Murillo 2020), and heavily supported the Trump re-election in 2024 (Vega Hübner and Bruno and Pueyo Mena 2024).
With the influx of 75-85 billion in funding toward ICE through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) of July 2025, I believe that ICE will soon be our neighbors, the person next to us in a religious service, our nephews, nieces, cousins, tias, and tios; for Latinxs, ICE will continue to become increasingly intimate in our lives and community. ICE will soon be both terrorizing our communities and sitting at our dinner tables. Snow Tha Product’s recent hit, Sábado, addresses this paradox in her song and the music video.
Map Your Data Flows into Technology
In our data, we are informants for ICE. It’s difficult to wrangle the many contracts that DHS/ICE maintains with information technology companies; indeed, I would argue that it is nearly impossible, and that this benefits this industry. Still, it is important and motivating to map out the many ways our data and money are related to ICE through Big Tech. Truthout recently published a guide on how to search for businesses that hold ICE contracts. The Electronic Frontier Foundation maintains a searchable database that identifies which technologies in your area of residence are used by law enforcement. Mapping the way your finances and data supports ICE and Border Patrol is a helpful motivator for activism.
Be Local
When I teach a course based on my book, Data Borders, in UCLA’s Information Studies Department, I ask my graduate students to localize their advocacy for immigrant data privacy. First, assess where you can best advocate for immigrant rights. For some, it may be delivering groceries to community members so they don’t have to leave their homes and expose themselves to ICE; for others, it may be documenting ICE presence in their cities and creating warning systems or developing Know Your Rights Trainings and red cards for their co-workers. We can take Rene Goode, killed by ICE in Minneapolis on January 7, as our example in localizing our activism. About her wife, Becca Goode said that Rene Goode “had a strong shared sense here in Minneapolis that we were looking out for each other” (Spencer 2026). Rene and Becca Goode’s example demonstrates the negotiated risk in which we enter when resisting states of fascism, a risk that is ubiquitous for undocumented people as we all use data-gathering technologies that partner with ICE.
Image 2: Street Art Photo taken by the Author in Murrieta, California, February 2026
Still, for some, their form of activism may be completely different. One of the most compelling projects in my class was by a student who had grown up in Silicon Valley and knew that her parents had designed technological systems that contributed to policing and surveillance structures. Her class project focused on educating her parents about the harms of these policing systems and reminding them of their own familial and cultural immigrant roots, and the harms that surveillance technologies can cause to their own communities around the Northern California Bay Area.
Policy, Policy, Policy
Every time I conduct a web search for Clearview AI, the Silicon Valley facial recognition company has once again been caught gathering and misusing data for ICE or Border Patrol. Clearview AI and their Tech company counterparts are often successfully sued by various cities and states, but over the years, this process has been a litigious game of whack-a-mole that rarely stops these billion-dollar companies. Alongside data privacy protections, we must advocate for the regulation of Big Tech through policy.
Amazon is among the largest contractors for the DHS, providing the cloud infrastructure that enables the operations of ICE (Del Rosario 2024), and that Amazon also served as a central example of Lina Khan, the chair of Federal Trade Commission, in articulating the urgent need for renewed antitrust enforcement in concentrated markets (Khan 2017). In 2017, Kahn compellingly argued for more regulation on Big Tech:
Given Amazon’s growing share of e-commerce as a whole, and the vast number of independent sellers and producers that now depend on it, applying some form of public utility regulation could make sense. Nondiscrimination principles seem especially apt, given that conflicts of interest are a primary hazard of Amazon’s vertical power. One approach would apply public utility regulations to all of Amazon’s businesses that serve other businesses. Another would require breaking up parts of Amazon and applying nondiscrimination principles separately; so, for example, to Amazon Marketplace and Amazon Web Services as distinct entities. That said, given the political challenges of ushering in such a regime, strengthening and reinforcing traditional antitrust principles may—in the short run—prove most feasible (Khan 2017).
Indeed, so powerful is the force of momentum in the policy and regulatory discourse that it has greatly swayed Big Tech to support the party favoring deregulation in the 2024 Presidential election (Del Rosario 2024). Regulation and antitrust can challenge Big Tech companies, and these policy developments must also consider the defense contracts that drive and sustain their growth as a reason for regulation and anti-trust. We must argue that contracts with ICE and Border Patrol pose a structural threat to democratic governance and human rights; one that is analogous to the threat monopolies pose to fair competition in market economies.
…But what if we also go local with our policy? In my graduate courses in Library and Information Studies, my students consider and write policies for their future workplaces that prioritize data privacy over data sharing, with particular attention to disengaging from technologies that support ICE. For libraries, this may mean challenging contractual relationships with big data brokers that also serve as information vendors, such as LexisNexis and Elsevier (Lamdan 2024), by including in their library policies that they will not contract with vendors that provide data to ICE.
Play the Long Game…Like my mom
Over ten years ago, anti-immigrant activists in Riverside County, California, blocked Border Patrol buses that held Central American detained migrants from arriving at the Murrieta Border Detention Center. Murrieta’s Mayor Alan Long urged residents to protest the arrival of those detained immigrants from Texas facilities (Hansen and Boster 2014). My mom and a small handful of local immigrant rights activists protested this ultra-nationalist sentiment, with signs reading ‘Welcome’ and food, water, and supply deliveries to those homes and locations where they were placed. For years, my mom and her small group of allies went to town halls in Lake Elsinore, Murrieta, and Temecula, California, speaking out against the adoption of anti-immigrant technologies such as the E-Verify employment tool (Cuevas 2010), which discriminates and reports on undocumented people. Those in favor of immigrant rights were a small group amid many anti-immigrant protesters.
Fast-forward to 2026, at the most recent No Kings protest in Temecula, California. My mom stands in shock, surrounded by hundreds in solidarity against ICE. She sees neighbors and friends from church lining the streets. “Look at all these people!” she yells, as the landscape has changed in front of her eyes. She is no longer standing in front of a crowd of anti-immigrant protestors at town halls; she is no longer one Mexican woman holding her protest sign.
Image 3: Melissa’s parents, fourth and fifth from left; working with TODEC in Riverside County to welcome migrants
Three years after the publication of Data Borders, what feels different is not the architecture but the visibility. The infrastructure of immigrant surveillance was already scaffolded through citizenship inclusion and exclusion, ICE contract procurement, and platform design; what has shifted is its public prominence and its intimate proximity to everyday life. Immigrant surveillance is not a peripheral system but is already interconnected into our information technology systems. If Data Borders were written differently today, it would be written with sharper urgency and would continue to prioritize responding to these systems in light of what undocumented people want for their data sovereignty.
This post was curated by Contributing Editor Tiên Dung Hà, and reviewed by Contributing Editor Wanqing Iris Zhou.
References
Chishti, Muzaffar, Sarah Pierce, and Jessica Bolter. 2017. “The Obama Record on Deportations: Deporter in Chief or Not?” Migration Policy Institute, January 26, 2017. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/obama-record-deportations-deporter-chief-or-not.
Cuevas, Steven. 2010. “Temecula-Area Cities Adopt Anti-Illegal Immigration Laws.” LAist. July 28, 2010. https://laist.com/news/kpcc-archive/temecula-area-cities-adopt-anti-illegal-immigratio
Del Rosario, Alexandra. 2024. “FTC Chair Lina Khan Got Under Big Tech’s Skin. Now They Want Her Gone.” Straight Arrow News. https://san.com/cc/ftc-chair-lina-khan-got-under-big-techs-skin-now-they-want-her-gone/.
Khan, Lina M. 2017. “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.” Yale Law Journal 126 (3): 710–805.
Lamdan, Sarah. 2023. Data Cartels: The Companies That Control and Monopolize Our Information. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Muñiz, Ana. 2022. Borderland Circuitry: Immigration Surveillance in the United States and Beyond. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Murillo, Ana. 2020. “New Study Explores why US Latinos Join ICE and Border Patrol.” Latino Rebels. July 6, 2020. https://www.latinorebels.com/2020/07/06/latinosiceborder/.
Spencer, Kim Hyatt. 2026. “Renee Goode’s Wife Releases Statement About ICE Shooting.” MPR News, January 9, 2026. https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/01/09/renee-goods-wife-releases-statement-about-ice-shooting.
Vega Hübner, Bruno and F. Jabvier Pueyo Mena. Cervantes Observatory at Harvard University. 2024. The Hispanic Vote in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Elections. Cambridge, MA: Cervantes Observatory at Harvard University. https://cervantesobservatorio.fas.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/95_en_the_hispanic_vote_in_the_2024_u.s._presidential_elections.pdf.
Villa-Nicholas, Melissa. 2023. Data Borders: How Silicon Valley is Building an Industry Around Immigrants. Univ of California Press.
