Every year, millions of people spend Super Bowl Sunday watching the game with family and friends. While the hype about the teams playing and Kendrick’s halftime show remains, this year is different. Folks are wanting to have fun and be in community, but the Trump administration – not like us – is rapidly expanding surveillance and deportation powers to separate families and communities. As a field organizer at MediaJustice, I can’t help but think of the migrant rights groups in Philadelphia calling for a general strike this weekend. Their action reminds us that while some gather for celebrations, others in our communities face mounting threats from an administration eager to weaponize technology against migrant families.
The threats aren’t hypothetical. Within days of Trump taking office, ICE began seeking contractors to expand its surveillance capabilities. Data brokers like LexisNexis and Venntel are already lined up to sell personal information that helps ICE track and target our communities. Companies like BI Incorporated – a subsidiary of the private prison corporation GEO – profit from the expansion of electronic monitoring – what we call e-carceration – which doubled under Biden from 86,000 to over 180,000 migrants forced to wear ankle monitors or use surveillance apps. These surveillance weapons are now being leveraged, as many people under these surveillance programs are being detained during check-ins with ICE including through programs also run by GEO.
But Trump’s vision goes even further. His administration wants to deploy “predictive analytics” to automate deportation decisions and expand the collection of biometric data like face scans, DNA, and fingerprints, including use of the HART database that DHS began building in 2016. These aren’t just technical upgrades. They’re the building blocks of a digital surveillance dragnet designed to terrorize our communities.
Let’s be clear: Tech corporations aren’t passive participants in this system. They’re actively working to profit from policies that separate families, destabilize communities, and violate human rights. To resist, we need each other. Last summer, we hosted over 450 people in Chicago for the second Take Back Tech, alongside our partners at Mijente. Many of the groups in attendance are actively fighting the tech corporations and data brokers behind Trump’s agenda.
This weekend, as migrant communities in Philadelphia take bold action to resist these threats, we must ask ourselves: What are we willing to do to disrupt the flow of data and technology that fuels attacks against migrants? What are we going to do to let them know that, in the words of Kendrick, “the audience not dumb”? The choice between watching silently or standing with our communities has never been clearer.
The Super Bowl will end Sunday night. But the fight to protect our communities from tech-powered surveillance and deportation is ongoing. Our resistance must match the scale of the threat.
