Gaby Del Valle | The Verge

The intolerable memes of Alligator Alcatraz

2025-07-18T15:41:15-04:00

Alligator Alcatraz, Florida’s hastily built, $225 million-and-counting immigrant detention facility in the Everglades, is both a de facto concentration camp and a right-wing meme. President Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters are willing to excuse — or are in some cases reveling in — allegations of inhumane treatment at the facility: worms in food, floors flooded with fecal water, fluorescent lights left on for 24 hours a day, and no air conditioning at night despite South Florida’s relentless humidity.

To them, the whole thing is a big joke, fodder for memes that activate the base even as they turn the majority of Americans off from Trump’s draconian immigration enforcement.

One Republican member of Congress is also selling Alligator Alcatraz merch

Laura Loomer, a close confidante of Trump’s, was giddy at the prospect of potential escapees dying in the act. “The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we start now,” she posted on X. (The figure refers not to the estimated number of undocumented immigrants in the country but to the United States’ entire Latino population.) Conservative commentator Benny Johnson compared the facility’s entrance to Jurassic Park and bragged about getting official Alligator Alcatraz merch during his visit. (Before his rightward turn, and before he was fired from BuzzFeed for plagiarism, Johnson also compared the Arab Spring to Jurassic Park. It’s unclear if he’s seen any other movies.) One Republican member of Congress is also selling Alligator Alcatraz merch to fund her reelection campaign. There’s more merch on Etsy. Obviously, there’s also a shitcoin.

The memes and merch are more than a get-rich-quick scheme for enterprising nativists, though grift is obviously always part of the MAGA equation. In his second term, Trump has turned immigration enforcement into a spectator sport. Far-right influencers like Chaya Raichik, better known as Libs of TikTok, have been invited to ride-alongs with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has turned her position into a sort of cowboy cop cosplay, often appearing in public in a bulletproof vest or a ten-gallon hat (or sometimes both). The official White House X account is posting “deportation ASMR” and Studio Ghibli-fied images of crying migrants in handcuffs.

There’s a real glee to it. To borrow from Adam Serwer, the cruelty is the point, but there’s more to it than that. At this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Vice President JD Vance said that voters had given Trump a mandate on immigration enforcement; Trump won the popular vote in part because the public was clamoring for mass deportations. It’s true that before the 2024 election, most voters expressed disapproval with President Joe Biden’s border policy and seemed open to a more hardline approach to immigration. But Trump — and the zoomers presumably running the White House’s social media — either haven’t realized that public opinion is no longer on his side with regard to immigration, or they simply don’t care.

Trump seems even less beholden to public opinion in his second term than he was in his first. Since January, he has pursued deeply unpopular policies, from tariffs to completely gutting the federal government, so relentlessly that he has even lost support from his own base. Half a year into Trump’s second term, it’s clear that voters agreed with some of his proposals in abstract terms — they elected him because he promised to “do something about immigration” and “run the government like a business” — but don’t like how these policies have played out in practice.

A chunk of Republican voters have turned against tariffs and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Still other Trump supporters have seen their friends, relatives, and spouses targeted by ICE since the president’s return to office. One naturalized citizen who voted for Trump was even stopped by ICE agents while driving to work; he now believes that ICE is racially profiling Latinos. He told a local news station that he voted for Trump because he would be targeting “criminals, not every Hispanic, Spanish-look-alike.” Trump’s approval rating on immigration is now down to 41 percent, the lowest since his second term began. Voters may have trusted Trump to get “criminals” out of the country, but they weren’t necessarily expecting his administration to indiscriminately target noncitizens (and some citizens as well), deploy the National Guard to arrest immigrants and crack down on protesters in Los Angeles, or disappear hundreds of people to a Salvadoran megaprison.

In a post on X, White House adviser Stephen Miller justified the decision to sic the National Guard on protesters by saying that “America voted for mass deportations.” Recent polling suggests that Americans are no longer on board with Trump’s immigration agenda. Rather than responding to this shift in voters’ sentiment, the administration appears to be doubling down on its all-or-nothing approach to immigration enforcement and to its gleeful depictions of these draconian policies online. The memes create a sort of alternate reality, a virtual universe in which everyone is still on the Trump Train and all Americans are thrilled at the prospect of feeding immigrants to alligators. This echo chamber benefits from — and is amplified by — algorithmic silos. Your average voter may read about Alligator Alcatraz in the news, but they aren’t necessarily seeing Benny Johnson’s concentration camp selfies. The memes are in-group signaling; they engender a sense of belonging for Trump’s most ardent supporters while inuring them to the cruelty of this new era. The memes are politics disjointed from polls and demagoguery free of democracy, a sign that the White House — either out of recklessness or something much worse — does not care about elections.

Right-wing orgs put pro-Palestinian students on an ICE ‘hit list’

2025-07-17T14:54:21-04:00

For nearly two years, students at Columbia University have warned that they’re being targeted — and put in serious danger — by right-wing Zionist organizations like Canary Mission and Betar US. Canary Mission’s goal was initially to “expose” students it deemed antisemitic, ideally in the hopes that they’d be denied jobs and other opportunities. In the aftermath of October 7th, students who were targeted by Canary Mission and similar groups said they experienced a surge of online harassment that increasingly spilled over into real life. The stakes were raised further upon Donald Trump’s reelection. Under Trump’s brutal immigration enforcement regime, these doxing databases have turned into tools of the state, making protesters visible and vulnerable to immigration enforcement. A senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official has appeared to confirm that the students were right.

Peter Hatch, the assistant director of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division, testified in court last Wednesday and Thursday that the Trump administration is using lists compiled by private groups to go after activists. In March, he said, his unit was told to urgently review a list of over 5,000 people to evaluate for deportation. The workload required moving analysts who typically work on counterterrorism and cybercrime to a “tiger team” dedicated solely to pro-Palestine protesters. At least 75 percent of the names had been provided by Canary Mission, Hatch said. (Canary Mission did not immediately reply to The Verge’s request for comment.)

If it seemed like too much attention was paid to the protests at one specific Ivy League campus last year, the tensions at Columbia turned out to be a bellwether of what would soon happen across the country. The program Hatch described appears to be an unprecedentedly sweeping and high-stakes example of a growing pipeline between private harassment and government action. For years, Republicans have drawn political fodder from online outrage. Congressional Republicans released tech executives’ internal communications to support their claim that social media platforms censored conservative voices online. Chaya Raichik, the woman behind Libs of TikTok, graduated from siccing her X, TikTok, and Instagram followers on LGBTQ students and teachers to advising Oklahoma’s Department of Education. Before his public falling out with Trump, Elon Musk directed harassment campaigns against federal employees whose jobs he believed should be cut by the Department of Government Efficiency. ICE’s reliance on information gleaned from — and at times manipulated or misrepresented by — far-right Zionist groups is an escalation that Columbia students have been warning about for years.

“There’s been absolutely no recourse this entire time,” said Maryam Alwan, a Palestinian student who graduated from Columbia this year and was involved in campus activism before and after Israel’s invasion of Gaza. In her time at Columbia, Alwan was subject to harassment from a coterie of individuals and organizations, including Canary Mission, an anonymous X page called Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus, and former Columbia professor Shai Davidai. “It really causes this sense of fear, especially among Palestinian students. They tend to go after Palestinian students the most.”

Upon Trump’s reelection, some of these groups began identifying noncitizen activists who could be targeted for deportation. In his two-day testimony, Hatch said that senior officials with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the federal agency that houses ICE, urged him to expedite the tiger team’s research into and reports on student activists. The first step was combing through the names on the list, which included both citizens and noncitizens, to determine who was deportable. HSI ultimately submitted between 100 and 200 reports to the State Department.

The anonymously run Canary Mission website has been active for nearly a decade, but its efforts intensified after Hamas’ October 7th attack on Israel and the long, brutal invasion of the Gaza strip that followed. Its website claims to document and denounce people who “promote hatred of the US, Israel, and Jews” and includes thousands of names and allegations of antisemitism. They range from chanting “from the river to the sea” and writing op-eds to “providing material support for terror groups,” though Alwan said she and several of her friends have been baselessly accused of the latter. Canary Mission deliberately conflates any pro-Palestinian stances with antisemitism. Overall, the list amounts to a smear campaign against pro-Palestinian activists, including those involved in Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaigns.

Canary Mission’s database, alongside similar lists from other groups, provides an easy pool of harassment targets. In the fall of 2023, a box truck covered in LED screens started driving around Columbia’s campus in Morningside Heights. The truck, which had been paid for by the conservative nonprofit Accuracy in Media, showed the names and photos of dozens of students it deemed “Columbia’s Leading Antisemites,” gathered from a list of students who were current or former members of organizations that signed onto a statement expressing solidarity with Palestinians.

“We were very adamant in trying to make the administration aware of our safety concerns, but we realized they weren’t going to do anything. They just stonewalled,” Alwan said. Columbia announced it was putting together a “doxing resource group” that November, but Alwan said it amounted to letting students input their information into a scrubbing site. “They did not ever take any action against the students or the faculty that were constantly doxxing us,” she added.

When Trump returned to office, he threw the power of the state behind these efforts. In March, ICE agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian Columbia graduate student who had negotiated with the university on students’ behalf. Khalil has a green card and no criminal background. To justify his arrest, ICE and the State Department claimed that Khalil’s mere presence in the United States is harmful to the US’s foreign policy interests. Just one day before ICE showed up at his door, Khalil emailed Columbia’s interim president, saying he had been the victim of a “vicious, coordinated, and dehumanizing doxxing campaign” led by a Columbia professor.

Khalil’s arrest was a harbinger of more to come — and the other students and activists ICE arrested were also targeted by Canary Mission and other groups. Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk was arrested for writing an op-ed asking the university to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and divest its endowment from companies with ties to Israel, which the Department of Homeland Security claimed was proof that she had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University, was arrested outside his home in Virginia. Columbia graduate student Mohsen Mahdawi was arrested during a naturalization interview with US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Other students were also targeted. DHS posted a video of Ranjani Srinivasan, a Columbia doctoral candidate who was in the country on an F-1 student visa, “self-deporting” after she learned that ICE agents had been looking for her.

Öztürk’s dossier, unveiled in court proceedings, included her op-ed in the student newspaper and her Canary Mission page. Khalil’s dossier included news clips about his involvement in Columbia’s protests, as well as his Canary Mission page.

The Trump administration has in fact warned of the risks of doxxing — of its own armed, masked, and unidentified ICE agents. The agents who detained Öztürk were masked; the agents who arrested Khalil did not initially identify themselves by name. In other words, the government is relying on dox lists to arrest noncitizens for exercising free speech while also claiming that ICE agents should remain unidentified for their safety.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) sued the Trump administration over its arrests of student activists, claiming it’s chilled political speech and violated the First Amendment with an“ideological deportation policy.” Whatever the outcome, though, the campaign of fear has already been effective.

J., a Columbia graduate student who asked to be referred to by their first initial because they fear retribution against noncitizen family members, told The Verge they were initially hesitant to get involved in campus protests because other students had been doxed.

“I kind of stayed away because of how militarized and surveilled our campus was,” J. said, ultimately changing their mind in the spring of 2025 after ICE arrested Khalil and other noncitizen students. “I was like, ‘Screw it. This is something bigger than me,’” said J., who is a US citizen. J. was one of the students who occupied Columbia’s library in May — and was doxxed shortly afterward. Canary Mission posted the students’ names and photos. The conservative Washington Free Beacon wrote a story on the nonbinary “they-tifada” that stormed the library.

By that point, J. said, a lot of students who were in the country on visas or green cards had “started to minimize the space they take up in the advocacy world for fear of repercussions,” including the threat of deportation. “The federal government is obviously taking an approach that is quite effective in scaring people into submission.”

George Wang, a staff attorney at Columbia’s Knight First Amendment Institute — which filed the suit against the Trump administration alongside the AAUP and Columbia’s Middle East Studies Association — said the recent wave of arrests amounts to a major escalation against student protesters.

“For a long time — and especially the last year and a half — there have been plenty of reasons why people who have engaged in pro-Palestinian speech and advocacy may have felt chilled, particularly on college campuses,” Wang said. But doxxing trucks and disciplinary action are “an entirely different category of harm than the potential of being arrested, detained, moved to detention in Louisiana, and possibly deported for engaging in that speech. The threat of deportation weighs so much more heavily on people than any threat of doxxing ever could.”

Alwan said the same groups who have called for the deportation of student activists are now engaging in lawfare against US citizens. She is one of four defendants in a lawsuit claiming that campus activists had foreknowledge of the October 7th attack and were “aiding and abetting Hamas’ continuing acts of international activism.”

“This lawsuit is based off of the same doxxing and harassment that was created over a year ago,” Alwan said. “Canary Mission is basically functioning as a hit list. We don’t know who’s funding it, there’s no accountability, and a lot of what’s on there is just completely made up in the first place.”

Why are liberals cozying up to race scientists?

2025-07-11T21:58:22-04:00

The New York Times’ recent report on Zohran Mamdani’s Columbia University application raised a lot of questions, such as: In what universe does this fall under the umbrella of news that’s fit to print? Why did the paper of record report on hacked materials it obtained from a quasi-anonymous online race scientist, given its prior refusal to report on other hacked materials of questionable provenance? And most importantly for our purposes — even if we concede that Mamdani’s college application was indeed newsworthy and acknowledge that journalists’ sources will at times include people with retrograde or abhorrent views — why was the Times deferential to the source at the expense of accuracy, obscuring his actual beliefs and agreeing to refer to him by a pseudonym even though his identity had previously been reported elsewhere?

This latter note may seem like a minor quibble, but it points to a broader phenomenon: the subtle creep of race science into mainstream political discourse. The Times obtained Mamdani’s Columbia application from “an intermediary who goes by the name Crémieux on Substack and X,” whom reporters described as “an academic who opposes affirmative action and writes often about IQ and race.” A quick Google search is all it takes to reveal that the person behind the Crémieux account is almost certainly Jordan Lasker, a lapsed academic and ardent advocate of eugenics. It’s technically true that Lasker/Crémieux “writes often about IQ and race” in the same way that it’s technically true that Donald Trump “speaks often about immigration.” It would be far more accurate to say Lasker writes that Black people are inherently and congenitally less intelligent than white people.

Egregious as it was, this incident is not isolated, nor did it come out of nowhere. The idea that race and IQ are connected — what’s known as “race realism” or “human biodiversity” — has become conventional wisdom on the right in the years since Trump was first elected. The notion of “human biodiversity” underpins the Trump administration’s efforts to do away with both affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. If success is downstream from intelligence and intelligence is determined by race and heredity rather than access and opportunity, then inequality is the product of biology, not policy. And if inequality is the product of biology, any attempts to eradicate it will be ineffective at best and, at worst, will elevate the inferior at the expense of their superiors. This is not a new argument; it is the thesis of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s controversial 1994 bestseller The Bell Curve and, more broadly, the intellectual heir of the centuries-old tradition of scientific racism.

Prominent liberal institutions have — for the most part, anyway — not yet endorsed the 21st-century iteration of race science, but they have helped launder it into the mainstream nonetheless by legitimizing its proponents while simultaneously obscuring their actual beliefs. In the wake of the 2024 presidential election, Democrats have scrambled to come up with an explanation for both Kamala Harris’ loss and the Republican Party’s gains with voters of color. The prevailing opinion among a certain cohort of liberal commentators is that voters are tired of identity politics and want politicians to focus on kitchen-table issues. This was already the prevailing opinion before the election, but now it has a flashy new title: Abundance. The idea, as presented by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in their new book of the same name, is that Democrats should be the party of more: more housing, more jobs, more opportunity, more clean energy, more prosperity. But to get there, they argue, we must do away with onerous regulations that impede progress.

The Abundance tent is an intentionally big one. It’s partly a bid to win over disaffected voters who defected from the Democratic Party, as well as conservatives who feel abandoned or betrayed by MAGA’s economic policies. In this sense, Abundance isn’t too different from Democrats’ post-January 6th efforts to woo Never-Trump Republicans by pivoting to the center. But Abundance liberals are also seemingly entering into political alliances with race scientists.

Take, for example, Thompson’s appearance on Richard Hanania’s podcast. Hanania, for those who are unfamiliar (I’m so jealous of you by the way), is an erstwhile member of the tech-right and author of The Origins of Woke, a 2023 book about how “wokeness” originated with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Years before he was a published author, Hanania blogged under the name Richard Hoste. Shielded by his nom de plume, he described himself as a race realist, called for the compulsory sterilization of “low IQ” people, and described himself as an opponent of “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” Hanania apologized for these writings after they were unearthed by HuffPost, saying they were from a time when he “truly sucked.” None of this affected Hanania’s career much, in part because of conservatives’ opposition to cancel culture and in part because the tech-right is almost entirely made up of race realists.

Hanania and Thompson may seem like strange bedfellows. But Hanania’s relationship with the tech-right has fractured since Trump returned to office. Last December, Hanania took Elon Musk’s side in a fractious online debate over H-1B visas. Hanania, after all, is a race realist, not a popular racist. The majority of H-1B recipients are from India and China. I won’t get into the intricacies of race scientists’ intellectual hierarchies, but suffice to say they believe some Asian groups are smarter than some white groups, with variations based on ethnicity and caste. (This is in fact a common defense among the human biodiversity crowd; they can’t possibly be racist if they believe East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews are the intellectual elite.) Hanania is a defender of “elite human capital” — also the title of his forthcoming book — no matter their skin color, which means he supports high-skilled immigration even if, as the nativist right claims, it comes at the expense of white American workers.

The nativists seem to have won that debate, at least for now. Musk is no longer in Trump’s ear, while Stephen Miller and other America First types continue to dictate Trump’s immigration policies. Hanania told Semafor’s Ben Smith that he left Marc Andreessen’s Signal group chat — which Hanania helped fill with prominent right-wingers — in 2023 after it became a “vehicle for groupthink.” He even claims to regret voting for Trump. He is now on a sort of apology tour. He has disavowed many of his former allies, described MAGA as having an IQ problem, and has accused Trump of “unprecedented” corruption. It makes sense, then, that Hanania would be looking to forge new alliances.

Thompson’s willingness to engage with Hanania, on the other hand, is a bit harder to parse. Abundance is best described as a book by liberals for liberals; it’s a roadmap for a sort of utopian tech-futurism. The book is both about the nitty-gritty of deregulation — Thompson and Klein argue that liberals’ affinity for bureaucracy and red tape has stalled growth, leading to a shortage of housing, jobs, and overall prosperity — and an effort to remake the Democratic Party in the wake of the 2024 election.

As part of their promotional tour, Thompson and Klein have put forth a theory on why Kamala Harris lost the popular vote. The Abundance authors are part of a growing chorus of liberal technocrats who claim that Harris’ deference to “The Groups” came at the expense of appealing to actual voters who are primarily concerned with the cost of living and are put off by Democrats’ emphasis on race and identity. To get the “solarpunk future” of Thompson and Klein’s dreams, Democrats must not only do away with overzealous regulation but also eschew culture war issues and the nonprofits that espouse them. Still, an abundant future is not a nationalist one — in fact, it relies on an influx of immigrant laborers with specialized skills, or what Thompson has described as “immigration-as-recruitment.” This future dovetails nicely with Hanania’s desire to eradicate DEI, as well as his support of high-skilled immigration.

Klein and Thompson, to be clear, are not race scientists, proponents of human biodiversity, or cryptofascists. They are avowed liberals — Klein is a Times columnist and Thompson worked at The Atlantic until recently — who are trying to salvage what’s left of the Democratic Party by giving it a pro-deregulation facelift. Unlike Trump’s mass deportations and total dismantling of the federal bureaucracy in the name of ending DEI, Abundance is not underpinned by scientific racism or eugenic ideology. But its figureheads certainly don’t stand up against it, and may even think that doing so is a waste of time better spent forging alliances with people across the ideological spectrum.

In a few months, Klein and Thompson will headline an Abundance conference organized in part by the Foundation for American Innovation, a conservative think tank that helped co-author Project 2025. Abundance means more of everything, including more of the tired Democratic strategy of forging a coalition by making overtures to repentant conservatives — including unrepentant racists who see entire swaths of the population as inherently and biologically inferior.

Why do lawyers keep using ChatGPT?

2025-05-30T15:43:20-04:00

Every few weeks, it seems like there’s a new headline about a lawyer getting in trouble for submitting filings containing, in the words of one judge, “bogus AI-generated research.” The details vary, but the throughline is the same: an attorney turns to a large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT to help them with legal research (or worse, writing), the LLM hallucinates cases that don’t exist, and the lawyer is none the wiser until the judge or opposing counsel points out their mistake. In some cases, including an aviation lawsuit from 2023, attorneys have had to pay fines for submitting filings with AI-generated hallucinations. So why haven’t they stopped?

The answer mostly comes down to time crunches, and the way AI has crept into nearly every profession. Legal research databases like LexisNexis and Westlaw have AI integrations now. For lawyers juggling big caseloads, AI can seem like an incredibly efficient assistant. Most lawyers aren’t necessarily using ChatGPT to write their filings, but they are increasingly using it and other LLMs for research. Yet many of these lawyers, like much of the public, don’t understand exactly what LLMs are or how they work. One attorney who was sanctioned in 2023 said he thought ChatGPT was a “super search engine.” It took submitting a filing with fake citations to reveal that it’s more like a random-phrase generator — one that could give you either correct information or convincingly phrased nonsense.

Andrew Perlman, the dean of Suffolk University Law School, argues many lawyers are using AI tools without incident, and the ones who get caught with fake citations are outliers. “I think that what we’re seeing now — although these problems of hallucination are real, and lawyers have to take it very seriously and be careful about it — doesn’t mean that these tools don’t have enormous possible benefits and use cases for the delivery of legal services,” Perlman said. Legal databases and research systems like Westlaw are incorporating AI services.

In fact, 63 percent of lawyers surveyed by Thomson Reuters in 2024 said they’ve used AI in the past, and 12 percent said they use it regularly. Respondents said they use AI to write summaries of case law and to research “case law, statutes, forms or sample language for orders.” The attorneys surveyed by Thomson Reuters see it as a time-saving tool, and half of those surveyed said “exploring the potential for implementing AI” at work is their highest priority. “The role of a good lawyer is as a ‘trusted advisor’ not as a producer of documents,” one respondent said.

But as plenty of recent examples have shown, the documents produced by AI aren’t always accurate, and in some cases aren’t real at all.

In one recent high-profile case, lawyers for journalist Tim Burke, who was arrested for publishing unaired Fox News footage in 2024, submitted a motion to dismiss the case against him on First Amendment grounds. After discovering that the filing included “significant misrepresentations and misquotations of supposedly pertinent case law and history,” Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, of Florida’s middle district, ordered the motion to be stricken from the case record. Mizelle found nine hallucinations in the document, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

Mizelle ultimately let Burke’s lawyers, Mark Rasch and Michael Maddux, submit a new motion. In a separate filing explaining the mistakes, Rasch wrote that he “assumes sole and exclusive responsibility for these errors.” Rasch said he used the “deep research” feature on ChatGPT pro, which The Verge has previously tested with mixed results, as well as Westlaw’s AI feature.

Rasch isn’t alone. Lawyers representing Anthropic recently admitted to using the company’s Claude AI to help write an expert witness declaration submitted as part of the copyright infringement lawsuit brought against Anthropic by music publishers. That filing included a citation with an “inaccurate title and inaccurate authors.” Last December, misinformation expert Jeff Hancock admitted he used ChatGPT to help organize citations in a declaration he submitted in support of a Minnesota law regulating deepfake use. Hancock’s filing included “two citation errors, popularly referred to as ‘hallucinations,’” and incorrectly listed authors for another citation.

These documents do, in fact, matter — at least in the eyes of judges. In a recent case, a California judge presiding over a case against State Farm was initially swayed by arguments in a brief, only to find that the case law cited was completely made up. “I read their brief, was persuaded (or at least intrigued) by the authorities that they cited, and looked up the decisions to learn more about them – only to find that they didn’t exist,” Judge Michael Wilner wrote.

Perlman said there are several less risky ways lawyers use generative AI in their work, including finding information in large tranches of discovery documents, reviewing briefs or filings, and brainstorming possible arguments or possible opposing views. “I think in almost every task, there are ways in which generative AI can be useful — not a substitute for lawyers’ judgment, not a substitute for the expertise that lawyers bring to the table, but in order to supplement what lawyers do and enable them to do their work better, faster, and cheaper,” Perlman said.

But like anyone using AI tools, lawyers who rely on them to help with legal research and writing need to be careful to check the work they produce, Perlman said. Part of the problem is that attorneys often find themselves short on time — an issue he says existed before LLMs came into the picture. “Even before the emergence of generative AI, lawyers would file documents with citations that didn’t really address the issue that they claimed to be addressing,” Perlman said. “It was just a different kind of problem. Sometimes when lawyers are rushed, they insert citations, they don’t properly check them; they don’t really see if the case has been overturned or overruled.” (That said, the cases do at least typically exist.)

Another, more insidious problem is the fact that attorneys — like others who use LLMs to help with research and writing — are too trusting of what AI produces. “I think many people are lulled into a sense of comfort with the output, because it appears at first glance to be so well crafted,” Perlman said.

Alexander Kolodin, an election lawyer and Republican state representative in Arizona, said he treats ChatGPT as a junior-level associate. He’s also used ChatGPT to help write legislation. In 2024, he included AI text in part of a bill on deepfakes, having the LLM provide the “baseline definition” of what deepfakes are and then “I, the human, added in the protections for human rights, things like that it excludes comedy, satire, criticism, artistic expression, that kind of stuff,” Kolodin told The Guardian at the time. Kolodin said he “may have” discussed his use of ChatGPT with the bill’s main Democratic cosponsor but otherwise wanted it to be “an Easter egg” in the bill. The bill passed into law.

Kolodin — who was sanctioned by the Arizona State Bar in 2020 for his involvement in lawsuits challenging the result of the 2020 election — has also used ChatGPT to write first drafts of amendments, and told The Verge he uses it for legal research as well. To avoid the hallucination problem, he said, he just checks the citations to make sure they’re real.

“You don’t just typically send out a junior associate’s work product without checking the citations,” said Kolodin. “It’s not just machines that hallucinate; a junior associate could read the case wrong, it doesn’t really stand for the proposition cited anyway, whatever. You still have to cite-check it, but you have to do that with an associate anyway, unless they were pretty experienced.”

Kolodin said he uses both ChatGPT’s pro “deep research” tool and the LexisNexis AI tool. Like Westlaw, LexisNexis is a legal research tool primarily used by attorneys. Kolodin said that in his experience, it has a higher hallucination rate than ChatGPT, which he says has “gone down substantially over the past year.”

AI use among lawyers has become so prevalent that in 2024, the American Bar Association issued its first guidance on attorneys’ use of LLMs and other AI tools.

Lawyers who use AI tools “have a duty of competence, including maintaining relevant technological competence, which requires an understanding of the evolving nature” of generative AI, the opinion reads. The guidance advises lawyers to “acquire a general understanding of the benefits and risks of the GAI tools” they use — or, in other words, to not assume that an LLM is a “super search engine.” Attorneys should also weigh the confidentiality risks of inputting information relating to their cases into LLMs and consider whether to tell their clients about their use of LLMs and other AI tools, it states.

Perlman is bullish on lawyers’ use of AI. “I do think that generative AI is going to be the most impactful technology the legal profession has ever seen and that lawyers will be expected to use these tools in the future,” he said. “I think that at some point, we will stop worrying about the competence of lawyers who use these tools and start worrying about the competence of lawyers who don’t.”

Others, including one of the judges who sanctioned lawyers for submitting a filing full of AI-generated hallucinations, are more skeptical. “Even with recent advances,” Wilner wrote, “no reasonably competent attorney should out-source research and writing to this technology — particularly without any attempt to verify the accuracy of that material.”

International students sue over Trump’s social media surveillance plan

2025-05-29T11:14:42-04:00

Fifteen Iranian students and researchers sued the Trump administration for completely halting student visa interviews while it determines whether to vet all visa applicants’ social media accounts.

The suit, filed against Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a Virginia federal court, claims that the pause on student visa interviews violates the Administrative Procedures Act, a law prohibiting capricious rule-making. The complaint is currently sealed.

In an email, Curtis Morrison and Hamdi Masri, lawyers for the students, noted that the State Department has required visa applicants to disclose their social media handles since May 2019. Visa applicants from certain Muslim-majority countries, including Iran, are already subject to “extensive social media vetting,” Masri said, adding that Trump seemed to want to “ensure students entering align with his political values.”

The students and researchers who brought the suit against Rubio were admitted to universities across the country — including Yale, Ohio State, and the University of South Florida — for graduate programs in computer science, engineering, finance, and other disciplines. Per their attorneys, each of the students had already attended visa interviews, but all of their applications are currently “awaiting national security vetting.” Some of the students were interviewed over a year ago.

The pause on student visa interviews is part of the Trump administration’s multi-pronged attack on universities and international students. On Wednesday, Rubio said the State Department would start working with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese Students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.” On May 22nd, DHS rescinded Harvard’s access to a federal database used to track foreign students’ enrollment, putting nearly 6,800 people enrolled at Harvard at risk of immediate deportation until a federal judge intervened.

Rubio has also suspended the visas of international students involved in pro-Palestine protests on campus. More recently, the State Department restricted visas of “foreign nationals who are responsible for censorship of protected speech in the United States,” i.e., regulators who enforce the European Union’s Digital Services Act.

If algorithms radicalize a mass shooter, are companies to blame?

2025-05-28T11:04:54-04:00

In New York court on May 20th, lawyers representing victims of a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York argued that Meta, Amazon, Discord, Snap, 4chan, and other social media companies all bear responsibility for radicalizing the shooter. The companies defended themselves against claims that their respective design features — including recommendation algorithms — promoted racist content to a man who killed 10 people in 2022, then facilitated his deadly plan. It’s a particularly grim test of a popular legal theory: that social networks are products that can be found legally defective when something goes wrong. Whether this works may rely on how courts interpret Section 230, a foundational piece of internet law.

In 2022, Payton Gendron drove several hours to the Tops supermarket in Buffalo where he opened fire on shoppers, killing 10 people and injuring three others. Gendron claimed to have been inspired by previous racially motivated attacks. He livestreamed the attack on Twitch and, in a lengthy manifesto and a private diary he kept on Discord, said he had been radicalized in part by racist memes and intentionally targeted a majority-Black community.

Everytown for Gun Safety brought two lawsuits over the shooting in 2023, filing claims against gun sellers, Gendron’s parents, and a long list of web platforms. Victims of the shooting brought two additional lawsuits against social media companies whose platforms Gendron had used. The accusations against different companies vary, but all place some responsibility for Gendron’s radicalization at the heart of the dispute. The platforms are relying on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to defend themselves against a somewhat complicated argument. In the US, posting white supremacist content is typically protected by the First Amendment. But these lawsuits argue that if a platform feeds it nonstop to users in an attempt to keep them hooked, it becomes a sign of a defective product — and, by extension, breaks product liability laws if that leads to harm.

That strategy requires arguing that companies are shaping user content in ways that shouldn’t receive protection under Section 230, which prevents interactive computer services from being held liable for what users post, and that their services are products that fit under the liability law. “This is not a lawsuit against publishers,” John Elmore, an attorney for the plaintiffs in one of the suits, told the judges. “Publishers copyright their material. Companies that manufacture products patent their materials, and every single one of these defendants has a patent.” These patented products, Elmore continued, are “dangerous and unsafe” and are therefore “defective” under New York’s product liability law, which lets consumers seek compensation for injuries.

Some of the tech defendants — including Discord and 4chan — don’t have proprietary recommendation algorithms tailored to individual users, but the claims against them allege that their designs still aim to hook users in a way that predictably encouraged harm.

“This community was traumatized by a juvenile white supremacist who was fueled with hate — radicalized by social media platforms on the internet,” Elmore said. “He obtained his hatred for people who he never met, people who never did anything to his family or anything against him, based upon algorithm-driven videos, writings, and groups that he associated with and was introduced to on these platforms that we’re suing.”

These platforms, Elmore continued, own “patented products” that “forced” Gendron to commit a mass shooting.

A meme-fueled shooting

In his manifesto, Gendron called himself an “eco-fascist national socialist” and said he had been inspired by previous mass shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso, Texas. Like his predecessors, Gendron wrote that he was concerned about “white genocide” and the great replacement: a conspiracy theory alleging that there is a global plot to replace white Americans and Europeans with people of color, typically through mass immigration.

Gendron pleaded guilty to state murder and terrorism charges in 2022 and is currently serving life in prison.

According to a report by the New York attorney general’s office, which was cited by the plaintiff’s lawyers, Gendron “peppered his manifesto with memes, in-jokes, and slang common on extremist websites and message boards,” a pattern found in some other mass shootings. Gendron encouraged readers to follow in his footsteps, and urged extremists to spread their message online, writing that memes “have done more for the ethno-nationalist movement than any manifesto.”

Citing Gendron’s manifesto, Elmore told judges that before Gendron was “force-fed online white supremacist materials,” Gendron never had any problems with or animosity toward Black people. “He was encouraged by the notoriety that the algorithms brought to other mass shooters that were streamed online, and then he went down a rabbit hole.”

Victims sued nearly a dozen companies — including Meta, Reddit, Amazon, Google, YouTube, Discord, and 4chan — over their alleged role in the shooting in 2023. Last year, a New York state judge allowed the suits to proceed.

Racism, addiction, and “defective” design

The racist memes Gendron was seeing online are undoubtedly a major part of the complaint, but the plaintiffs aren’t arguing that it’s illegal to show someone racist, white supremacist, or violent content. In fact, the September 2023 complaint explicitly notes that the plaintiffs aren’t seeking to hold YouTube “liable as the publisher or speaker of content posted by third parties,” partly because that would give YouTube ammunition to get the suit dismissed on Section 230 grounds. Instead, they’re suing YouTube as the “designers and marketers of a social media product … that was not reasonably safe and that was reasonably dangerous for its intended use.”

Their argument is that YouTube and other social media website algorithms’ addictive nature, when coupled with their willingness to host white supremacist content, makes them unsafe. “A safer design exists,” the Everytown complaint states, but YouTube and other social media platforms “have failed to modify their product to make it less dangerous because they seek to maximize user engagement and profits.”

The plaintiffs on other suits made similar complaints about other platforms. Twitch, which doesn’t rely on algorithmic generations, could alter its product so the videos are on a time delay, Amy Keller, an attorney for the plaintiffs in one of the suits, told judges. Reddit’s upvoting and karma features create a “feedback loop” that encourages use. 4chan doesn’t require users to register accounts, allowing them to post extremist content anonymously. “There are specific types of defective designs that we talk about with each of these defendants,” Keller said, adding that platforms that have algorithmic recommendation systems are “probably at the top of the heap when it comes to liability.”

During the hearing, the judges asked the plaintiffs’ attorneys if these algorithms are always harmful. “I like cat videos, and I watch cat videos; they keep sending me cat videos,” one of the judges said. “There’s a beneficial purpose, is there not? There’s some thought that without algorithms, some of these platforms can’t work. There’s just too much information.”

After agreeing that he loves cat videos, Glenn Chappell, an attorney on the Everytown suit, said the issue lies with algorithms “designed to foster addiction and the harms resulting from that type of addictive mechanism are known.” In those instances, Chappell said, “Section 230 does not apply.” The issue was “the fact that the algorithm itself made the content addictive,” Keller said.

Third-party content and “defective” products

The platforms’ lawyers, meanwhile, argued that sorting content in a particular way shouldn’t strip them of protections against liability for user-posted content. While the complaint may argue it’s not saying web services are publishers or speakers, the platforms’ defense counters that this is still a case about speech where Section 230 applies.

“Case after case has recognized that there’s no algorithms exception to the application of Section 230,” Eric Shumsky, an attorney for Meta, told judges. The Supreme Court considered whether Section 230 protections applied to algorithmically recommended content in Gonzalez v. Google, but in 2023, it dismissed the case without reaching a conclusion or redefining the currently expansive protections.

Shumsky contended that algorithms’ personalized nature prevents them from being “products” under the law. “Services are not products because they are not standardized,” Shumsky said. Unlike cars or lawnmowers, “these services are used and experienced differently by every user,” since platforms “tailor the experiences based on the user’s actions.” In other words, algorithms may have influenced Gendron, but Gendron’s beliefs also influenced the algorithms.

Section 230 is a common counter to claims that social media companies should be liable for how they run their apps and websites, and one that’s sometimes succeeded. A 2023 court ruling found that Instagram, for instance, wasn’t liable for designing its service in a way that allowed users to transmit harmful speech. The accusations “inescapably return to the ultimate conclusion that Instagram, by some flaw of design, allows users to post content that can be harmful to others,” the ruling said.

Last year, however, a federal appeals court ruled that TikTok had to face a lawsuit over a viral “blackout challenge” that some parents claimed led to their children’s deaths. In that case, Anderson v. TikTok, the Third Circuit court of appeals determined that TikTok couldn’t claim Section 230 immunity, since its algorithms fed users the viral challenge. The court ruled that the content TikTok recommends to its users isn’t third-party speech generated by other users; it’s first-party speech, because users see it as a result of TikTok’s proprietary algorithm.

The Third Circuit’s ruling is anomalous, so much so that Section 230 expert Eric Goldman called it “bonkers.” But there’s a concerted push to limit the law’s protections. Conservative legislators want to repeal Section 230, and a growing number of courts will need to decide whether users of social networks are being sold a dangerous bill of goods — not simply a conduit for their speech.

Correction, May 28th: An earlier version of this article conflated Everytown For Gun Safety’s lawsuit with other suits filed against social media companies over the Buffalo shooting.

NPR sues Trump over executive order cutting funding for public broadcasting

2025-05-27T13:21:53-04:00

NPR sued President Donald Trump over his executive order cutting federal funding for NPR and PBS.

The suit, filed in a Washington, DC, federal court by NPR and public radio stations in Colorado, claims that Trump’s effort to slash the broadcasters’ congressionally granted funding is unconstitutional. It also alleges that Trump violated the First Amendment by characterizing NPR and PBS as “biased media” and rescinding their federal funding as a result.

“It is not always obvious when the government has acted with a retaliatory purpose in violation of the First Amendment,” the complaint reads. “‘But this wolf comes as a wolf.’” Trump has accused NPR and PBS of having content that is not “fair, accurate, or unbiased,” the complaint claims, and his and other administration officials’ comments about public broadcasters “only drive home” the executive order’s “retaliatory purpose.”

In an April 1st post on Truth Social, for example, Trump described NPR and PBS as “RADICAL LEFT ‘MONSTERS’ THAT SO BADLY HURT OUR COUNTRY.”

The complaint notes that the Supreme Court recently ruled that “it is no job for government to decide what counts as the right balance of private expression — to ‘un-bias’ what it thinks is biased, rather than to leave such judgments to speakers and their audiences.” The lawsuit alleges that Trump’s executive order “expressly aims to punish and control” NPR’s and PBS’s “news coverage and other speech that the administration deems ‘biased.’”

Beyond the First Amendment issues, the suit claims that Trump is violating a basic tenet of the separation of powers: Congress’ ability to determine how federal funds are spent.

“The president has no authority under the Constitution to take such actions,” the complaint reads. “On the contrary, the power of the purse is reserved to Congress.”

Congress doesn’t fund NPR or PBS directly, instead allocating money to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which then distributes funds to public broadcasters. CPB — a private corporation authorized by congressional statute — receives funding two years in advance.

NPR receives about 1 percent of its annual revenue from CPB. Local stations are more dependent on it, receiving 8 to 10 percent of their annual revenues from the corporation. PBS receives roughly 15 percent of its revenue from CPB.

In a statement to NPR, CPB chief Patricia Harrison said Trump doesn’t have authority over CPB. “Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government,” said Harrison, a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee. Harrison added that when creating CPB, Congress “expressly forbade ‘any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors.”

Trump’s executive order is one of several administration efforts to strip public broadcasting of its federal funding. In January, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair Brendan Carr launched an investigation into whether NPR and PBS violated FCC guidelines by airing commercials.

“To the extent that taxpayer dollars are being used to support a for profit endeavor or an entity that is airing commercial advertisements,” Carr wrote in a letter to the heads of NPR and PBS, “then that would further undermine any case for continuing to fund NPR and PBS with taxpayer dollars.”

Trump tries to ban Harvard from enrolling international students

2025-05-23T16:03:13-04:00

President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to strip Harvard of its ability to enroll international students — an effort blocked by a federal judge on Friday, just hours after the university filed a lawsuit claiming Trump was violating its First Amendment rights.

On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rescinded Harvard’s access to the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), a government database of international students attending universities in the United States. The students’ visas weren’t canceled, but DHS’s revocation of Harvard’s SEVIS certification could, in theory, make nearly 6,800 international students enrolled at Harvard deportable immediately.

“This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus,” DHS secretary Kristi Noem said on Thursday. “It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multibillion-dollar endowments. Harvard had plenty of opportunity to do the right thing. It refused.”

A month earlier, DHS demanded that Harvard turn over information on its international students, including their “known illegal activity,” “known dangerous or violent activity,” “known threats to other students or university personnel,” and “known deprivation of rights of other classmates or university personnel.” The department also requested information on any disciplinary action that had been taken against international students who participated in protests. DHS threatened to rescind Harvard’s SEVIS certification if the university didn’t turn over student records by April 30th.

Since taking office, Trump has used allegations of antisemitism at universities across the country to retaliate against students involved in campus protests against the war on Gaza — and against the universities themselves, which the administration claims haven’t done enough to quell antisemitism on their campuses. In addition to pulling billions of dollars in federal funding, the administration has also had Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrest several students over their pro-Palestine activism. Some of these students, like Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, are green card holders whom ICE has accused of engaging in behavior that is contrary to the US’s foreign policy interests. Others are international students whose visas were revoked by the State Department, thus making them deportable.

Instead of targeting individual students at Harvard, the Trump administration is going after the university’s ability to enroll international students altogether. Unlike Columbia, which capitulated to a list of Trump’s demands, Harvard has generally refused to comply with the administration’s requests that it hand over data on its international students; “audit” its academic programs, as well as students’ and faculty’s political views; and change its governance structure and hiring practices.

Harvard sued the administration on Friday. In a complaint filed in Massachusetts federal court, the university’s lawyers called DHS’s revocation of its SEVIS certification a “blatant violation of the First Amendment.”

“It is the latest act by the government in clear retaliation for Harvard exercising its First Amendment rights to reject the government’s demands to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum, and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students,” the complaint alleges. “With the stroke of a pen, the government has sought to erase a quarter of Harvard’s student body, international students who contribute significantly to the University and its mission.”

Moreover, the suit claims, revoking Harvard’s SEVIS status puts students in an impossible position. “Termination of SEVIS records presents student visa holders whose school loses its certification with two bad choices,” the complaint claims: transferring immediately, or leaving the country.

A federal judge has temporarily blocked DHS’s attempt to revoke Harvard’s SEVIS certification. The university’s international students are safe — for now.

America’s immigration system was a landmine, and Trump set it off

2025-05-15T11:00:41-04:00

Last Friday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested Newark mayor Ras Baraka outside a detention center. Baraka was trying to visit the facility — which opened recently and is operated by the GEO Group, a private prison company — with members of New Jersey’s congressional delegation. Baraka was not only denied entry but arrested by agents from ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division, even though he’s a US citizen. He was ultimately charged in federal court with one count of trespassing and released from custody after several hours.

Baraka’s arrest was just one of many recent immigration-related developments that could have easily taken up a whole news cycle, alongside Customs and Border Protection (CBP) interrogating popular Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and White House adviser Stephen Miller declaring that the administration is “actively looking” at suspending the constitutional right to habeas corpus. But while Trump’s actions may seem unprecedented, he is relying on infrastructure built up over decades, largely with bipartisan support. The difference now is that Trump is using it to target anyone and everyone, including US citizens who criticize his policies.

US immigration law grants a stunning amount of power to the executive branch. While there is legislation in place governing how many people can legally migrate to the US in a given year and dictating the grounds for deportability, most other immigration policy is largely at the president’s discretion, especially when Congress is gridlocked. The law determines who can come to the US and who can be removed; the president decides whether to carry out these removals at all.

Our immigration laws were often written with particular targets in mind: communists in the 1950s, terrorists in the 2000s. Congress established the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after September 11th, ostensibly to protect Americans from the “terrorist threat” that lurked everywhere. DHS merged immigration enforcement with national security, trampling over everyone’s civil rights in the process. At the time, civil libertarians warned that the vast surveillance powers granted to DHS and its many component agencies would allow the government to monitor just about anyone.

The post-9/11 immigration enforcement regime is a dragnet by design. In the warped logic of the War on Terror, mass surveillance was a small price to pay to root out national security threats, who by their very nature operated surreptitiously. Lawmakers could excuse the dysfunctions of this system before Trump because of the turn-of-the-century fervor over terrorism and, crucially, because of a set of norms that they foolishly believed could remain in place throughout their lifetimes.

Under a nakedly authoritarian administration, limits to executive power — implicit and explicit — no longer exist because the president says they don’t and that’s that. Just a few months into his second term, Trump has demonstrated that if a court dares to rule against him, he’ll just defy their orders. Congress, narrowly controlled by Republicans who know Trump values loyalty above all else, is unwilling to conduct any meaningful oversight of the executive branch. The system of checks and balances only matters if we all agree that it matters.

Due process is another one of those things everyone takes for granted until it’s gone — but that, for many immigrants, was already tenuous. Trump and several other members of his administration have recently claimed that noncitizens aren’t entitled to due process, and that people who are legally in the US have nothing to worry about. That’s obviously not true, since ICE recently arrested a US citizen and refused to release him even after his family produced his birth certificate, which was also verified by a federal judge. The man was released from ICE custody, but the fact remains that due process is what prevents ICE from deporting people without cause in the first place.

It’s worth noting that ICE has wrongfully deported US citizens in the past. This isn’t a problem that is unique to Trump; if anything, it’s proof that what passes for due process in the immigration system was a farce even before he took office. Unlike people being charged with a crime, people in deportation proceedings don’t get free, government-appointed counsel if they can’t afford to hire their own attorneys. The onus is not on a prosecutor to prove that someone is deportable but on the person facing deportation to prove that they aren’t. Even this minimal form of due process is too much for the Trump administration, which has sought to strip people in removal proceedings of even the most basic legal protections.

Trump has also expressed interest in deporting US citizens, telling reporters he was open to the idea of sending “homegrown criminals” to CECOT, the prison in El Salvador to which DHS deported Venezuelan migrants under the Alien Enemies Act. With virtually no evidence, the Trump administration accused the migrants deported to CECOT of being members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

Unlike the migrants deported to El Salvador without hearings, Baraka was released from custody after a few hours. Piker was allowed back into the US after questioning. Both men are US citizens, which means they can’t legally be removed from or denied entry into the country. That’s not to say it hasn’t happened before: in the mid-1950s, US citizens were ensnared in “Operation Wetback,” a mass deportation campaign targeted at Mexican-Americans devised by ICE’s precursor, the Immigration and Naturalization Services. Some historians estimate that half of the two million people removed from the US under Operation Wetback were US citizens.

These new shows of force are still alarming signs that the Trump administration is willing to use the immigration system to go after anyone his administration deems a threat or enemy. It’s easy to say that Trump is flouting any attempts to check his power, that he is behaving as an authoritarian. Both statements are correct and worth repeating, but they don’t tell the whole story. With regards to immigration, Trump is, for the most part, working within the rules rather than against them. His actions indicate not the unique depravity of his administration but the banal cruelty of the system largely operating as intended.

In establishing DHS, Congress expanded the surveillance state beyond intelligence agencies, granting the executive branch further license to keep tabs on everyone within our borders, noncitizens or otherwise, in the name of national security. Congress gave the president the discretion to decide how, when, and whether to deport noncitizens. Now, Trump is pushing that discretion to its limits, and few people seem to have realized just how far that push could go.

Border agents are going to photograph everyone leaving the US by car

2025-05-14T18:33:35-04:00

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) plans on photographing every single person who leaves the US by car, an agency spokesperson told Wired. The agency says it will start using facial recognition technology at official border crossings to match all outbound travelers’ faces to their passports, visas, or other travel documents, though there’s no public timeline for when this will happen.

“Although we are still working on how we would handle outbound vehicle lanes, we will ultimately expand to this area,” CBP spokesperson Jessica Turner told Wired. It’s an expansion of the agency’s current practice of photographing travelers as they enter the country and matching those photos with “all documented photos, i.e., passports, visas, green cards, etc,” the agency has on record.

CBP has been working on ways to track people as they leave the US for over a decade. After two years of lab tests, CBP experimented with collecting travelers’ biometrics at airports in 2016. That year, the agency partnered with Delta Air Lines to photograph passengers boarding a Tokyo-bound flight at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

The agency’s collection of outgoing travelers’ biometric data has expanded since then. CBP currently uses “biometric facial comparison technology” to process travelers exiting the US at 57 airports, including Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta, Los Angeles International Airport, Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, and John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York — some of the busiest airports in the country. The airport panopticon continues to expand.

“We found that facial recognition was intuitive for people. Everybody knows how to stand in front of a camera and have his or her photo taken,” John Wagner, at the time the deputy assistant commissioner of CBP’s office of field operations, said in an agency article promoting CBP’s biometric technologies. “Not so with iris scans and fingerprints. Every time a traveler does the process wrong, someone has to instruct him or her the right way to do it.”

Collecting passengers’ fingerprints may be less intuitive than taking their pictures, but CBP does that, too. Agents stationed at airports across the country use a handheld device called Biometric Exit Mobile to take certain travelers’ fingerprints before they board their flights. Those fingerprints are then run against law enforcement databases.

If CBP’s role is to process people for entry into the US, why track people on the way out? Wired notes that biometric databases could be used to monitor self-deportations. Having realized that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) lacks the resources to arrest, detain, and deport each and every one of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the US, President Donald Trump is encouraging undocumented immigrants to leave the US on their own, offering people $1,000 if they leave the country voluntarily.

But CBP was devising ways to collect travelers’ photos, fingerprints, and other biometric data long before Trump took office. The agency says it collects this data to run people’s biometrics against law enforcement databases, therefore ensuring that people with criminal records are removed from the US. The agency’s promotional article touting its biometric technologies includes a “success story” involving a Polish couple who had “criminal histories with multiple identities” caught leaving the US under false names. Since DHS’s formation in the wake of the September 11th attacks, immigration enforcement has blurred the lines between criminal enforcement and national security. Every international traveler is a potential criminal or terrorist, justifying mass surveillance.

Trump didn’t invent this playbook. But his mass deportation agenda is getting a helpful boost from decades of bipartisan turbocharging of the surveillance state.

Update, May 14th: Updated to clarify that John Wagner no longer works for CBP.