“Ice is just around the corner,” my friend said, looking up from his phone. We were writing at a coffee shop in one of the oldest neighborhoods of New York City, where schools and churches support thriving migrant communities as they have since long before the United States existed. Now the agents of this rogue federal agency – recognized for civil rights abuses like racial profiling, wrongful detention, medical neglect and inhumane detentions – were just footsteps away, shaking down our neighbors in their homes and at the park across the street.
A day earlier, I had met with foreign correspondents at the United Nations to explain the AI surveillance architecture that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) is using across the United States. The law enforcement agency uses targeting technologies which one of my past employers, Palantir Technologies, has both pioneered and proliferated – tools I was once charged with illustrating as a graphic designer and writer, yet the consequences of which I am just coming to understand. Although largely invisible, technology like Palantir’s plays a major role in world events, from wars in Iran, Gaza and Ukraine to the detainment of immigrants and dissident students in the United States. But despite its ubiquity, lawmakers, technologists and the media are failing to protect people from the threat of this particular kind of weaponized AI and its consequences, partly because they haven’t recognized it by name.
