Mass Surveillance in the Trump Era
The second Trump administration is building a mass surveillance state to persecute immigrants and police online speech. We’re not even a year into this authoritarian regime and we’ve already reached the point where if you step out of line or post disfavored opinions on the Internet, you could lose your job, your family, and even your freedom.
In addition to exploiting existing technology, such as automated license plate readers, the administration is monitoring social media and expanding its surveillance capabilities. The spending bill Congress passed this summer included $6 billion for surveillance infrastructure at the U.S.-Mexico border where the government already deploys drones, license plate readers, cameras, and trail sensors. In recent months, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has embarked on a surveillance tech spending spree which includes hiring contractors to work round-the-clock combing through posts, messages, and images on Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok and cross-reference the information with addresses, utility bills, and other records available in commercial databases to develop detailed profiles of arrest targets and generate leads to find them.
While the administration has many invasive surveillance tools at its disposal, we are not powerless. As individuals, we can thwart the government’s ability to snoop on us as we go about our daily lives by disabling location services on our phones. Meanwhile, the ACLU of Northern California will continue advocating for stronger privacy protections and we will hold authorities accountable for following the Constitution and state law.
Automated License Plate Readers
The nationwide network of thousands of automated license plate readers is one of the greatest privacy threats we face during a second Trump administration. These high-speed surveillance cameras capture images of passing vehicles and record the license plate number, location, date, and time and store the information in a database.
With a few clicks, local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies — including ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and the Department of Homeland Security — can gain access to a trove of data revealing millions of drivers’ daily movements as they travel to and from home and work. Police from states that criminalize abortion could use the information to monitor vehicles near clinics in states where abortion remains legal and track visiting patients. ICE could use ALPR data to locate, detain and deport immigrants. These aren’t theoretical scenarios; this is already happening.
In May, a Texas police officer reportedly searched 83,000 far-flung ALPR cameras to find a woman who had a self-managed abortion. Also in the spring, researchers discovered that local and state police departments across the country are conducting warrantless searches of license plate location data on behalf of ICE.
In California, many police departments have flouted a 2015 state law ACLU NorCal helped pass that prohibits them from sharing ALPR data with federal and out-of-state law enforcement agencies, including for immigration enforcement purposes. Four years ago, we sounded the alarm when we sued the Marin County Sheriff’s Office for illegally sharing millions of drivers’ license plates and locations with outside agencies, including ICE and Customs and Border Protection. As part of a settlement, the sheriff agreed to end the practice.
Demand for automated license plate readers has surged and the systems have proliferated in communities across the country and California in the past decade. While police departments control most of these driver surveillance networks, homeowners’ associations have put up ALPR cameras to record vehicle traffic in their neighborhoods and some of the groups have given police access to the collected data.
Oakland operates nearly 300 ALPR cameras, and last year San Francisco installed 400, ostensibly to improve public safety and aid in criminal investigations. It didn’t take long for the city to run afoul of the law. From August 2024 through February of this year, the San Francisco Police Department reportedly let outside agencies run 1.6 million illegal searches of the city’s license plate reader database, and at least 19 of those searches were marked related to ICE.
With the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in September we filed a Public Records Act request with SFPD seeking proof it has ended this unlawful data sharing. We also called on the department to put safeguards in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
“The Trump administration could exploit license plate reader data to monitor marginalized communities or groups falsely labeled public safety threats,” said Matt Cagle, senior staff attorney with ACLU NorCal’s Democracy, Speech, and Technology Project. “Before cities install cameras or approve other surveillance systems, they must consider how the information could be weaponized, and against whom, both by local police and if it fell into the wrong hands.”
San Francisco isn’t the only California city where police recently misused the ALPR system. In October, Attorney General Rob Bonta sued the Southern California community of El Cajon for sharing license plate location data with authorities in more than two dozen states despite repeated reprimands from his office.
ICE invests millions in surveillance tech
Facial recognition, phone location tracking software, an iris-scanning app, spyware, and a high-powered drone — these are some of the surveillance tools ICE reportedly purchased this year to help agents locate and arrest immigrants. However, the administration might also subject American citizens who lawfully protest ICE or oppose any government action to the same intrusive surveillance under the guise of investigating so-called “antifa.”
This technology raises significant constitutional concerns. Face recognition software is notoriously inaccurate in identifying Black and Asian people, and we know at least eight individuals have been wrongfully arrested based on false matches. Spyware would allow agents to remotely hack phones and search photos, messages, and encrypted apps. The tracking software collects location data from hundreds of millions of cellphones every day. One system would allow the government to track a specific person’s phone location data without a warrant.
As the administration continues to test the limits of the Constitution, we are prepared to protect our civil rights and civil liberties.
Social media surveillance
The unlawful detentions of Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk were a chilling preview of the government’s crackdown on free speech. Initially, the administration singled out international college students who protested the war in Gaza, criticized Israel, or posted pro-Palestinian content, accusing them of antisemitism and flagging them for deportation. But the target list soon expanded to include critics of ICE and Border Patrol.
Although reviewing social media posts has been part of the immigration vetting process for nearly a decade, the Trump administration has supercharged social media surveillance of legal permanent residents, visa holders, visa applicants, and foreign visitors. In June, the State Department announced it will screen student visa applicants’ social media accounts for a history of political activism, hostility towards the U.S., and support for foreign terrorist organizations.
The government also plans to subject 55 million current visa holders to “continuous vetting,” a comprehensive process that will include trawling their social media accounts using AI-enabled software to search for alleged violations that could warrant visa revocation or deportation. And DHS already contracts with a company that provides location data from phone apps that agents can use to map people’s movements.
DHS also seeks to intimidate and silence Americans. In response to viral videos of masked ICE and Border Patrol agents snatching people off the streets and assaulting bystanders, DHS has threatened to prosecute anyone who films and posts footage online of federal officers, which the agency claims constitutes “doxing” and illegal harassment, even though doing so is protected by the First Amendment.
Although tech leaders who clashed with Trump over social media content moderation policies during his first term appear unlikely to resist the administration’s assault on civil liberties on their platforms, we are prepared to challenge the government in court. When DHS issued an administrative subpoena seeking to unmask activists behind several Instagram accounts that document immigration raids in the Los Angeles area, we filed a motion in federal court to prevent Meta from complying with the demand for the name, email address, and phone number associated with an account that reposted a video identifying a Border Patrol agent. The court ordered Meta not to disclose our client’s personal information while our motion was decided. When DHS similarly demanded records for an Instagram account that reports on ICE activity in a Philadelphia suburb, we partnered with our colleagues at the ACLU of Pennsylvania to and get a similar temporary order to protect our client’s anonymity.
“The First Amendment protects the right to record government agents conducting their duties in public, publish their names in print or online, and criticize their conduct,” said Jacob Snow, senior staff attorney with the Democracy, Speech, and Technology Project. “The administration’s attempt at an end-run around the Constitution is an egregious abuse of power.”
Although Americans remain closely divided on immigration, national polls show that people are growing wary of ICE’s violent tactics and anecdotal evidence suggests awareness that the agency is tapping into the ALPR network has raised doubts about installing cameras in some communities. Likewise, muzzling late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel backfired by galvanizing opposition to censorship.
Moving forward, ACLU NorCal remains committed to fighting the administration’s lawless crusade to track our movements, pry into our private lives, and suppress free speech.
