Caitlin Dickerson

And then finally, the COVID-19 pandemic came around and gave him the pretense that made White House lawyers say, OK, now is the time we can shut down the border.

I think something similar is happening with the Insurrection Act.

Trump has been threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act since his first presidency, and it's coming up again now.

And so I can see why you're saying that there's a perception that there's a desire to create the conditions that would justify something like that as an even further escalation.

I mean, we've seen so many.

I don't have the sense that individual ICE officers are being told, escalate things as much as possible.

Make sure things get violent.

You know, that would be pretty reckless and actionable legally.

But what I think we are seeing very clearly, and in Stephen Miller's message that you played a few minutes ago, is that the idea is do what you have to do.

Don't focus so much on the laws and the rules and civil rights.

Focus on getting people into custody at any cost.

So a lot of this is really being kept under wraps by the security contractors that are involved.

But from what we can see in the public requests for proposals, ICE is really increasing its use of facial recognition technology, both at the border and within the interior of the country today.

And then hiring companies like Palantir to collect as much data really to create almost dossiers on people drawing from their education records, their financial records, their social media accounts, utilities, etc.

And try to create files on immigrants and immigrants.

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.