Immigrant Surveillance Machine

A Replay of Eugenic Technologies for Authoritarian Conditioning 

The right-wing MAGA’s immigrant surveillance and deportation machine will not end with a focus on immigrants alone. We can see that clearly by looking at the history of eugenic campaigning—and the prolific explosion of pro-segregation, race-based profiling and monitoring technologies that it spread across the United States at the turn of the century, that were ultimately used to target far broader popuations. Today’s surveillance technology companies are similarly seeing unprescedented growth from the Trump administration’s extraordinary expansion of immigration and border law enforcement, with the Big Beautiful Bill (BBB)’s new $168 billion appropriation exponentially expanding the already outsized $34 billion budget currently being channeled to fuel MAGA’s anti-immigrant agenda.

Then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds a sign supporting his plan to build a wall between the United States and Mexico that he borrowed from a member of the audience at his campaign rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Photo by Jonathan Drake/Reuters. Source: PBS

The astounding proportions not only encompass $46.5 billion allocated to complete construction of the border wall with Mexico, but $5.9 billion for new technology and “cutting-edge border surveillance” to enhance domestic profiling and surveillance as well. The investments aim to allow the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – already the subject of a class-action law suit for racially profiling Latinx residents—to empower ICE to triple current deportation rates to reach 1 million per year, and to provide ICE with enough detention capacity for an average daily population of 100,000. Or as Trump’s acting ICE Director Todd Lyons chillingly put it, to make deportation “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”

The inflated investments demonstrate the ready potential to leverage an immigration containment system into an expanded agenda of political repression, as eugenicists had done in the United States over a centuty ago.  While the feasibility of MAGA’s projected goal of one million deportees annually has been debated, there’s no question that their anti-immigrant agenda has already super-charged the surveillance and data profiling industry. Big Tech firms like Palantir Technologies—the facial-recognition and profiling-focused software company co-founded by billionaire entrepreneur and MAGA funder Peter Thiel— have experienced record-making growth, receiving more than $900 million in federal contracts in this year alone to build military-grade AI tools that advance the administration’s agenda.

Palintir’s ImmigrationOS platform, contracted for $30 million by ICE, whose prototype is expected to be delivered thisfall, promises to combine sensitive data obtained by DOGE from agencies like the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Social Security Administration (SSA), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and DHS. The integration and repurposing of data collected from individuals with the understanding that it would serve the public (including tax filings, social security numbers and immigration status) – would instead allow the platform to operate as a centralized database for real-time profiling and targeting of individuals for detention and deportation. The civil rights organization, Mijente underscored the insidiousness of the threat newly posed to the Latinx and broader immigrant communities participating in public life: “The same structures meant to serve the public will now funnel data into a tool that tracks, targets, and terrorizes our gente. The danger of our own data being weaponized against us when using public systems (applying for visas, paying taxes, etc) cannot be understated.”

Beyond a focus on immigrants alone, reports have already emerged around the Trump administration’s work to push Palantir software into federal agencies to enable data to be integrated across formerly discrete databases to create detailed portraits of U.S. citizens based on government-held data on bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status. Such an aggregation, in other words, would provide a master list of personal information on Americans that could enable, as the New York Times’ Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolik put it in a May 2025 report, “untold surveillance power.”

MAGAites are not the first to turn their anti-immigrant agenda in the United States, however, into a blueprint for broader political containment and repression. My book, Predatory Data: Eugenics in Big Tech and Our Fight for an Independent Future explores how a century ago, U.S. eugenicists came to recognize how much their own monitoring techniques and technologies could be used to supercharge xenophobic paranoia and public tolerance for authoritarian rule. By expanding the use of monitoring technologies to surveil immigrant populations, and circulating data they collected as “evidence” of an immigrant invasion and threat to healthy, “native-born” American lives, they found an effective means to amplify public anxieties around economic and demographic changes at the turn of the century.

They discovered, that is, that their monitoring technologies and xenophobic disinformation could operate together as expedients for justifying political extremism—helping them them not only to pass the world’s first immigrant bans with the Chinese exclusion acts of 1875 and 1883, but to expand their political targets to far broader “threat” classes. By 1917, they helped to introduce an immigrant quota system to broadly limit “non-Nordic” immigrants, had spread the use of intelligence tests to segregate disabled and “feebleminded” populations (along with others including “anarchists”, that could be labeled as “mentally unfit”) at schools as well as immigration centers, and helped legalized the forced steriliza­tion of “unfit,” “degrading” populations in more than 30 states.

Eugenical Sterilization Map of the United States, 1935. Source: PBS, Independent Lens, 29 Jan. 2016, https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/unwanted-sterilization-and-eugenics-programs-in-the-united-states/

 The history of eugenic monitoring and data collection in the United States reminds us how rapidly their work could be repackaged into political campaigns and consumer-facing products, and how broadly their arguments to withdraw established rights could grow beyond immigrant populations to other threat classes. It was eugenicists’ seeding of a surveillance economy that allowed them to turn their movement—once only legible to discrete circles of elite Western scientists, researchers and health professionals in the 19th century—into a full-blown international force decades before the rise of the Third Reich. Indeed, when Adolf Hitler looked for a model for what a future Nazi “utopia” would be, it was his exchanges with researchers at the U.S.-based Eugenics Record Office and best-selling works by the Yale-educated Madison Grant that he turned to as “his bible.”

Trump, of course, has made his own embrace of a eugenics’ playbook disturbingly evident. The evidence spans not only his constant references to the “good genes” of MAGA audiences, and his references to the “bad genes” and the predisposition to crime of immigrants—dehumanized as “animals,” “stone cold killers” and the “worst people” – but his embrace of a surveillance economy to further dataify and assess what he’s called the “enemy from within.”  MAGA’s eugenics replay, however, may not be obvious to those who only remember eugenics as an outgrowth of Nazi Germany. Eugenics, in fact was seeded by the English biostatistician and data-collection fanatic, Francis Galton, a cousin to Charles Darwin, who first sought to grow a movement for rigorous population monitoring by scientific elites of the 19th century. He penned his first treatise for eugenics in the 1860s—during the same time the United States waged its Civil War, and when varied independence uprisings across European colo­nies, including the Haitian Revolution and 1857 Indian mutiny, were growing. But Galton’s “Hereditary Character and Talent,” published in 1865, asserted an aggressively anti-egalitarian, hereditarian vision for conserving Western supremacy. With it, Galton provided a program for maintaining Western dominance over the globe’s “unfit” races, and asserted a bold vision for controlled social engineering pinned around expanding surveillance mechanisms and the controversial assertion that individual character, talent and intellect were incontrovertibly hereditary.

Countering liberal enlightenment thinking of the time around the possibility of educating and civilizing subjects, he argued for the innate nature of the character and intellect of different races, and insisted that “abundant data” existed—and that more could surely be collected—to support his claim that genius, like other “peculiarities” of character, including “craving for drink,” “pauperism” and proclivities to “crimes of violence” and “fraud,” were all inheritable. And he used his argument to launch a critique of national welfare policies as artificially preserving the lives of the weak and “deteriorat[ing] the breed.” If elites like him could instead be empowered to expand and normalize the use of technologies for rigorous population monitoring and selective breeding, he enthused, what “high priests of civilization” and “what a galaxy of genius might we not create!”

Galton’s fervor would bring him to found a new biometrics lab at the University College London before the turn of the century. But it was in the United States—with global immigration perceptibly on the rise—where eugenics’ policymaking ambitions rapidly gained ground well beyond research classes. In the United States, the specter of difference of non-white immigrant could be weaponized to dramatize the existential risk to well-born white lives and need to expand surveillance techniques over immigrant masses to protect the survival of society’s worthy classes.  

Thus the nation’s first passage of a law that aimed to restrict immigration of a specific ethnic or national group —the 1875 Page Act—targeted Chinese women, based on their status as presumed prostitutes who would infect healthy white men. With it, the United States introduced the world’s first biometric, photographic ID system for tracking and evaluating immigrants’ cross-continental movement. Leveraging eugenic disinformation around the innate “Chinese racial character” replete with immorality and “hereditary vices,” where Chinese women were projected as “the source of the most terrible pollution of the blood,” and the root of an astounding 90 percent of the venereal disease in cities like San Francisco, the Page Act pledged to “[end] the danger” that criminal Chinese women posed to white native-born lives in the late-19th-century. Developed before the general use of passports, the new monitoring system it established initially applied only to Chinese women seeking U.S. entry. It required they submit themselves to enhanced scrutiny and evaluation by providing photographic and written documentation to verify their moral fitness and prove they were not criminal prostitutes,with the data collected consistently used to deny entry. Codified as virulent, depraved prostitutes who actively sought out victims and young boys to the ruin of respectable families, the Page Act and its profiling system effectively foreclosed Chinese women’s immigration into the United States – and drastically restricted the “birth of Chinese American citizens” for generations.

Eugenicists’ expansion of immigrant surveillance also normalized the growth of journalistic and municipal investigations that circulated evidence of the “criminal Chinese,” with night-time community raids, and invasive residential mappings justified as means to contain the “vice-prone” Chinese following the passage of the Page Act. Packaged as public reports and as voyeuristic news exposes, they made Chinese settlements legible to audiences as a “laboratory of infection” and explained the spread of diseases—everything from smallpox to cholera to the bubonic plague—as rooted in the Chinese population’s racial preposition to criminal behavior and virulent disease. Inspections routinely resulted in violent expulsions, the destruction of buildings, and the dispossession of residences – as in the case of Honolulu’s Chinese quarter, which was burned to the ground after two cases of bubonic plague were reported in 1899. Widespread publicity was generated from such inspection theaters, as news reports on iinformal midnight journeys and fact-finding missions fed public alarm. Even when there was no basis to such eugenic profiling, their monitoring mechanisms reliably produced the data and “evidence” needed to justify groups’ exclusion and expulsion.

Image of a family affected by anti-Chinese legal measures. Source: In Women’s History Month: Spotlight on the 1875 Page Act. https://www.reproductiveaccess.org/2017/03/womens-history-month-spotlight-on-the-1875-page-act/

Eugenicists’ anti-immigrant profiling would further prove profitable in the marketplace. By the turn of the century, their efforts fueled a “golden age of eugenics publishing” in which respected publishing houses, from G. P. Putnam’s Sons to Henry Holt & Company and the Macmillan Company packaged xenophobic disinformation into best-sellers. Multi-volume books like “The Chinese at Home and Abroad”— repackaging reports on community raids into San Francisco’s Chinatown and documentation on its “repulsive people”— was marketed when it was published in 1885 as “the Book of the Hour!” by A. L. Bancroft, the first major publishing house in California. Texts like Madison’s Grant’s Passing of the Great Race further popularized notions of U.S. the racial “suicide” and “extermina­tion through immigration” when it was published in 1916.  Warning of “mongrelization” and the broad threat of degrading immigrant classes, Grant’s text sold through eight editions and multiple translations, with its publisher, Scribner’s, crediting it as “a pioneer” that allowed U.S. publishers to see how much “the race question has now become a favorite” among audiences, and how much “data” that resulted from expanded scrutiny over “unfit” classes could yield profit-making markets.

Eugenicists’ success at growing demands for monitoring technologies likewise allowed them to establish an intelligence testing industry in the United States that claimed to profile “mental unfitness.” Use of their exams and monitoring systems would quickly grow to applications in schools, the military and other public institutions, including immigration points. After deploying psychological exams to monitor for “mental unfitness” at Ellis Island, and concluding that over 80% of non-Nordic immigrants were “feebleminded,” the eugenicist Henry Goddard helped institute such tests as a requirement under the U.S.’s 1917 Immigration Act. Targeting Jewish, southern and eastern European, and Asian immigrants in particular, the biased system for data collection helped guarantee that the 1917 and 1924 US immigration acts introduced race-based quotas to increase “Nordic” immigration from northern Europe, and prevent non-Anglo entry.  Along with feebleminded persons, idiots, illiterates and imbeciles, the 1917 Act added exclusions too for alcoholics, contract laborers, paupers, political radicals and vagrants, who were framed by eugenicists as added biological threats and social expenses to society. It laid the ground for the historic 1924 Immigration Act that drastically reduced immigration into the United States and that initiated the use of national quotas to limit immigration from undesired nations. Targeting Jewish, southern and eastern European and Asian immigrants in particular, it increased immigration from northern Europe significantly, while Jewish immigration fell from 190,000 in 1920 to 7,000 in 1926, and with immigration from Asia—already severely restricted from the Chinese Exclusion Acts from the 1870s onward—almost completely cut off until 1952.

While eugenicists’ spread of pro-segregation monitoring technologies and biased data allowed them to make expansive gains in immigration policies at the turn of the century, it proved to be a powerful tool for conditioning public tolerance for an increasing range of anti-democratic policies too. Following the first gains in immigration restrictions, eugenic advocates at centers like the Eugenics Research Office leveraged “data” collected to evidence the threat of contamination by the mentally unfit to promote sterilization laws. From 1907 to 1917, such efforts made rapid gains, so that by 1917, some fifteen states had passed laws to allow the sterilization of convicted criminals, the mentally disabled and the mentally ill in state custody, with over 30 states signed on by 1930. California’s passage of such a law eventually allowed 20,000 individuals to be sterilized between 1909 and 1979—a disproportionate number of whom were working-class, Latinx, Indigenous and Black women who were incarcerated or in state institutions for disabilities.

Trump and the tech industry heads empowered by MAGA’s anti-immigration agenda seem to be inspired by such history of political and market-based profiteering. Since his first day back in office, when tech industry heads visibly aligned themselves behind theTrump’s administration, the tech industry has played an increasingly central role in amplifying MAGA’s white nationalist drama.  From DOGE’s projection of government fraud and rampant waste of “good American’s” tax dollars, to social media companies’ —from X to Facebook’s—open circulations of doctored images of tattooed Latinx bodies among MAGA-endorsed images that evidence immigrant criminality, to Palantir’s expansion of the administration’s real-time profiling capacity, Big Tech has helped Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda to be recast as a MAGA crusade to defend “real America.” We should call this out for what it is: blatant political scapegoating to enrich techno-elites and the far right, whose real aim is to normalize mass surveillance through the use of profiling technologies that erode democratic protections for all. Much as it was more than a century ago with eugenics,  this is authoritarian conditioning through and through.