Caitlin Dickerson

There's also data on people's cars and their license plates and just to kind of be able to constantly monitor and locate people.

And I think there are lots of concerns about what happens with all that data and who is being swept into these collection efforts.

I think it's pretty impossible to keep American citizens out, you know, when you're collecting video for the purposes of facial recognition, whether it's at the border or

when people are coming home from their vacation or within the interior of the country.

I think what it comes down to is just collecting a massive amount of information on people that can be used to track them down more easily, but also to monitor their behaviors and their activities.

And I think that's important because of what you mentioned earlier, this expanded use of labels like domestic terrorist that the Department of Homeland Security is sprinkling into its messaging that we've seen in a presidential action memo from Trump himself.

This memo that hasn't gotten, I think, as much attention as it deserves is very broad in its definition.

It says that domestic terrorists tend to espouse views such as and lists anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, views opposing the traditional American family, and even extremism on migration, which, of course, this administration opposes.

would describe anybody who is out in the streets protesting or trying to protect immigrants without legal status in their communities.

You can't imagine language that's more broad.

And so I think that's one of the things that makes this technology so concerning.

The money is so staggering and unprecedented that we don't have an image in the past that we can look to to try to guess where all of this is going.

But as you pointed out, it's a military-sized budget, and it's leading to physical changes to the country, large detention centers that are already starting to spring up and that the administration wants to dramatically increase.

Boots on the ground in American cities, you know, armed officers who are questioning people, asking for proof of citizenship, accosting them, who are hostile to protesters and anybody willing to question their work.

Although I think it's important to acknowledge that it's not typical, the level of pushback that law enforcement is facing in the streets either.

I think, you know, they are facing an unprecedented level of challenge to their work and all of that is...

contributing to the conflicts that we're seeing and the chaos that we're seeing, I think it just looks like a very different country than we're used to.

I mean, we're starting to see what that image is.

We can see it on social media and on the videos that have gone viral.

So far, though, most of those incidents are relatively isolated.