Here’s the creepiest thing you’ll read all day:
Federal immigration officers fanning out across Minnesota and other parts of the country are newly equipped with an array of state-of-the-art surveillance technologies, thanks to a bill passed last summer thattransformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the country’s most highly funded law enforcement agency. ICE has wasted no time spending its war chest, buying new tools ranging from biometric trackers to mobile phone location databases, spyware and drones, while loosening restrictions on how it uses some of these technologies.
These new surveillance powers come at a time when ICE is also pushing the bounds of its traditional role of immigration enforcement. In recent months, ICE leaders, backed by top Trump administration officials, have asserted the authority to use all available tools to monitor and investigate anti-ICE protester networks, including U.S. citizens. Democratic lawmakers and civil rights groups say the agency’s expanding use of its surveillance tools infringes on privacy and free speech rights of immigrants and U.S. citizens alike.
The Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part, disclosed in an annual report on Wednesday that the agency has significantly expanded the operational scope for its use of facial recognition, AI and other advanced technologies. In a statement to the Washington Post, DHS said ICE’s use of innovative technologies in investigations is “no different” than other law enforcement agencies. “We are not going to divulge law enforcement sensitive methods,” it said.
This is a gift link to the whole article. The Post lays out the full array of tools they are using and it is beyond chilling. It’s like something out of a dystopian Sci-Fi novel.
But what did we expect? They have basically given a secret police agency and unlimited budget and they are going to spend it.
And it’s not only on high-tech spying equipment against Americans. Get a load of this:
Despite protests in small towns and cities across the US, the Trump administration is pushing ahead with the purchase of warehouses it plans to convert into immigration jails in what could be the largest expansion of such detention capacity in US history.
The cost for acquiring two warehouses alone was $172 million. A third in El Paso, Texas, could be among the largest jails of any kind in the country if completed as envisioned, with 8,500 beds. The deals mark the latest turn in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s plan to use as many as 23 warehouses for detaining thousands of immigrants arrested by federal agents in Minneapolis and other cities. Those aggressive enforcement actions have ignited clashes with protesters and led to agents killing two US citizens.
On Jan. 16, the administration paid $102 million for a site near Hagerstown, Maryland, according to a local court filing. A week later, the government paid $70 million in cash for a warehouse in Surprise, Arizona. The price tags — roughly in line with the industry average for the warehouse market — cover just the acquisition of the sites, which are currently empty shells. ICE still has to pay companies to outfit the buildings with toilets, showers, beds, dining and recreation areas and then run them as detention centers.
The El Paso site was purchased by the Department of Homeland Security recently, according to people familiar with the transaction who asked not to be named discussing a confidential process. But the sale price hasn’t yet been made public. Other transactions appear to be near completion. Canadian billionaire Jim Pattison’s company said in a statement that it had accepted an offer to sell its 550,000-square-foot warehouse in Ashland, Virginia, to a US government contractor. “Some time later, we became aware of the ultimate owner and intended use of the building,” it said. “This transaction is still subject to certain approvals and closing conditions.”
It’s a massively corrupt boondoggle. As we knew it would be when they passed that grotesque bill last summer.
They have to get rid of this agency and start over. The expense is obscene and the power they’ve vested in it is enormous. We won’t survive as a democracy if we don’t.