The article also mentions that private prison companies see potential opportunities with the incoming administration. The GEO Group, which runs the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP) and contracts with ICE to run detention centers, believes it can scale up its program to accommodate hundreds of thousands, or even millions of participants. However, concerns remain about the potential for unauthorized persistent monitoring and misuse of data collected from immigrants.
Key takeaways:
- The Biden administration uses surveillance and artificial intelligence technology to track, detain, and deport immigrants lacking permanent legal status. These tools include an algorithm that ranks immigrants based on their potential risk of absconding and a mobile app that uses facial matching and geolocation data.
- Concerns have been raised about the fairness of using an algorithm to assess flight risk and the amount of data collected by the mobile app. Some AI systems have been found to discriminate based on race, gender, or other protected traits.
- President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to repeal Biden’s AI policy when he returns to the White House and has not revealed how he plans to carry out his promised deportation of an estimated 11 million people living in the country illegally.
- The Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, which includes the mobile app SmartLINK, is run by BI Inc., a subsidiary of the private prison company The GEO Group. The GEO Group also contracts with ICE to run detention centers.