How Trump's mass deportation plan can use AI to extend immigration crackdown

A signature campaign promise of President-elect Donald Trump is to initiate mass deportations of undocumented residents of the United States. At a Sept. 12 campaign stop in Tucson, Arizona, Trump promised to "begin the largest mass deportation mission in the history of our country." 

Trump's selection of Thomas Homan as "border czar" and Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy, two officials seen as hard-liners on immigration, suggest that the administration's approach to a crackdown will attempt to make good on that promise and be aggressive, though details have not been provided by the Trump transition team.

Trump has said he will start mass deportation efforts with criminals, but he has also vowed to repeal Temporary Protected Status for individuals. He said in a brief post-election interview with NBC News that he has "no choice" but to pursue mass deportation after the election results, and that there is "no price tag." 

Homan, former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said earlier this year that "No one's off the table. If you're here illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder," and he vowed to "run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen."

Carrying out these pledges, though, is logistically daunting. Artificial intelligence may help.

While AI wasn't widely used during the first Trump administration's immigration crackdown, the technology has become more accessible and widely deployed across many systems and government agencies, and President Biden's administration began devoting DHS budget and organizational focus to it.

In April, the Department of Homeland Security created the Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board to help establish perimeters and protocols for the technology's use. The 2025 DHS budget includes $5 million to open an AI Office in the DHS Office of the Chief Information Officer. According to the DHS budget memo, the office is responsible for advancing and accelerating the "responsible use" of AI by establishing standards, policies, and oversight to support the growing adoption of AI across DHS.

"AI is a transformative technology that can unprecedentedly advance our national interests. At the same time, it presents real risks we can mitigate by adopting best practices and taking other studied concrete actions," DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said when inaugurating the new board.

Now there is concern among experts that DHS's mission will pivot towards deportation and use untested AI to help. Security experts close to DHS worry about how an emboldened and reoriented DHS might wield AI.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesman wouldn't speculate on how AI might be used in Trump's administration. 

The Trump transition and Homan did not respond to requests for comment.

Petra Molnar, a lawyer and anthropologist specializing in the impacts of migration technologies on people crossing borders and the author of "The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence," has studied the use of technology along the border, which includes drones and robodogs, as faculty associate at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She has been critical of AI's use at the border under Democratic Party administrations, but does think that the weaponization of AI will grow under Trump's administration.

"Knowing the Trump administration has signaled they want to conduct the largest mass deportation in U.S. history and the fact that they have these tools at their disposal, it creates a surveillance dragnet not just at the border but inland that could capture communities all over the U.S.," Molnar said, adding that an entire ecosystem of industry has been created to police borders and immigration.

"There's been a huge influence of the private sector in the growth of the border-industrial problem," Molnar said, adding that private companies have led the way in introducing robodogs (with benign names like Snoopy and Sniffer), drones, and AI-infused towers.

"Much of the surveillance technology has been expanded under Democratic administrations, but there has been a signaling of the incoming administration that tech will be a tool to assist them in accomplishing their goals," Molnar said.

An AI immigration dragnet vs. AI deregulation and growth

Remaya Campbell, acting commissioner for Homeland Security for the District of Columbia, said that AI could automate immigration-related decision-making, bypassing traditional processes.

"AI could be used to identify individuals for deportation broadly. With little regard for privacy or due process," Campbell said, adding that AI decision-making systems operate with the values their users impart. "And in the Trump administration, that could certainly mean reinforcing intersectional biases to align with political priorities," she said. "At a minimum, we could expect AI to be leveraged not as a tool for efficiency, fairness, and safety in immigration-related decision-making, but as an instrument of systemic bias and authoritarian rule," Campbell added.

Neil Sahota, an AI advisor to the United Nations AI for Good Initiative, said he shares those concerns given that AI already has a muscular presence in managing the vast, challenging-to-monitor U.S. borders, and it that usage will expand under Trump.

DHS's Customs and Border Protection already has employed AI-powered drones with machine-learning capabilities to identify unusual patterns that could signal illegal crossings, drones that can distinguish between people, animals, and vehicles, and help to minimize false alarms, Sahota said. Sensor towers equipped with AI provide 24/7 monitoring, allowing faster response times and freeing up human resources.

"Expectations are that a Trump administration would push for even more AI surveillance, potentially introducing autonomous patrols and expanding biometric screening," Sahota said.

While this could improve border security, it could also spark concerns around privacy, particularly for those living near borders. And Sahota added that the Trump administration's use of AI could expand beyond security and aid in deportation. "AI surveillance systems would be a cornerstone of Trump's deportation strategy," Sahotra said. "Enhanced AI could fast-track deportations," Sahota added, which would come with the potential for rights violations and racial profiling.

These systems use facial recognition and behavior analysis capabilities to identify people suspected of being in the country illegally, but he cautioned that these systems don't always get it right. "How do we handle situations where AI makes errors in identifying people's immigration status? What if the system mistakenly flags a legal resident or citizen for deportation? The consequences are devastating for families and our community," Sahota said.

Laura MacCleery, senior policy director of Unidos U.S., the nation's largest Hispanic advocacy group, said AI accuracy problems are well known, with systems making inaccurate conclusions, and data on people of color tending to be less accurate.

DMV records, utility bills, and facial recognition technology at the border and the airports will all be tools that could be enhanced with AI to pursue deportation.

"These technologies could be changed and altered and have different guardrails in a different administration. The concern about mass deportations is the enhanced use of AI by immigration enforcement and to superpower the ability to monitor public data, MacCleery said.

It is inevitable, she said, that AI will sweep up U.S. citizens.

"Because there are U.S. citizens that live with people of different immigration status and those people will get swept up and the due process rights of people who are here legally could be violated and that is super problematic and an inevitable consequence of the overuse of these kinds of technologies," MacCleery said.

But Marina Shepelsky, CEO, co-founder, and immigration attorney at New York-based Shepelsky Law Group, said she is not thinking about AI policy in the Trump administration as a dystopian technology to fear. "He is a businessman, he will see value in allowing AI to progress and grow to make the lives of lawyers like myself, doctors, scientists, etc., easier," Shepelsky said. 

She thinks AI will blossom and be deregulated in a Trump administration. "Hopefully, with Elon Musk at his side, President Trump would push for more foreign tech AI experts to come to the U.S. quicker and with less red tape to improve AI and reduce its current awkwardness," Shepelsky said. "I am not an alarmist and not tearing out my hair about Trump being our next president. I may not like all his policies, but with AI – I do think he will push for its growth, and for laws and regulations to be more flexible to allow AI to grow."