Automating Deportation: The Artificial Intelligence Behind DHS's Immigration Enforcement Regime

Just Futures Law, Mijente, June 2024

"The Department of Homeland Security in conjunction with corporations has aggressively pushed the idea that AI will make immigration processing more efficient, more objective and less biased. Many of the same companies pushing AI hype have won lucrative AI contracts with DHS. As our research shows, AI tools are now pervasive at DHS – agency decision makers use AI to make a range of decisions that impact people’s lives, from adjudicating immigration benefits to designating people as “public safety threats” to locating individuals for detention and deportation. Just this year, DHS released an AI roadmap, detailing how AI will be used in its core missions. DHS has released policy language in support of civil rights and privacy and against systemic bias and discrimination. However, as we explain in Section I.C. of this report, DHS is both side stepping its own policy requirements and failing to meet the federal government’s minimum requirements for responsible deployment of AI. As such, DHS’s fast-tracking of AI threatens to worsen the existing discriminatory practices of the immigration system without our knowledge, while also violating civil and privacy rights of millions of immigrants, families, and the larger U.S. community."