A decade ago, when New Mexico legislators changed the state’s laws so that unauthorized migrants could get driver’s licenses, they had people like Maximo Olivas-Perea in mind.

A longtime resident of Santa Fe, Olivas-Perea did not have the federal government’s permission to live in the United States. But here he was, nonetheless, living in a mobile home near the city’s small airport. Until 2016.

That’s when, after renewing his license—as state law allows migrants to do—his life flipped upside down.

LexisNexis, a company that creates and sells access to enormous digital databases, fed information from Olivas-Perea’s license application into its system. One of the company’s customers, the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, found Olivas-Perea’s updated address information there and tracked him down. Seven years after moving into the Santa Fe mobile home, Olivas-Perea was propelled into the immigration prison and deportation pipeline thanks to a license renewal.

This is immigration policing in the age of Big Data.

ICE spends handsomely on digital surveillance partnerships. In 2021 alone, the agency spent $388 million on contracts that let it search vast databases created by private companies like LexisNexis.

I can understand why ICE relies on LexisNexis. As an immigration lawyer and researcher, I have used it my entire career to stay up-to-date about changes in the law. As a teacher, I tell my students that LexisNexis is an invaluable resource as they wage legal fights on behalf of their future clients.

Companies like LexisNexis and Palantir have proven themselves savvy technicians capable of turning fantasies about sifting through massive quantities of data into digital surveillance realities.

But it also helps immigration officials buy their way around democracy. States that try to welcome migrants are seeing the federal government pay to access sprawling private databases that snare people who local governments want to protect.

ICE agents and their counterparts in the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection unit turn to private surveillance systems to learn about arrests, scan through phone logs or figure out people’s social media usernames. Much of this information is, in theory, publicly and legally available from government agencies. Police and sheriffs’ departments, as well as county jails, regularly release information about whom they arrest or release. Most court records about criminal prosecutions and convictions are also publicly available. But in reality, none of these are easy to access. Often, it requires visiting courthouses or navigating clunky websites.

That’s where digital surveillance companies come in. They collect and repackage data so it’s easier for customers to make sense of. LexisNexis feeds criminal history records and court documents into its Accurint Virtual Crime Center, which is slickly marketed to law-enforcement clients. But it doesn’t stop there. The subscriber-only portal, which the company says contains more than 1 billion records, also includes data on vehicle registrations and mortgages, credit information, marriage and divorce filings—even fishing permits.

The company’s software can piece together strands of information that aren’t obviously connected more quickly than any human analyst could. For the privilege of accessing that data for a year, ICE agreed in February 2023 to pay LexisNexis $22 million.

LexisNexis sells its products to both ICE and the defense lawyers they face off against in courtrooms. But its competitor Palantir stands firmly with its deep-pocked government customers. Named after J.R.R. Tolkien’s palantíri, the powerful stones from his Lord of the Rings series that can see anywhere on command, the company’s co-founder, billionaire tech industry veteran Peter Thiel and its CEO Alex Karp imagine the company’s software as leveraging its vast stores of information for the public good. “We have chosen sides,” company executives wrote in a 2020 letter to regulators.

In Tolkien’s fiction, the brilliant wizard Saruman, who once stood alongside the motley crew that defended Middle Earth from evil, eventually fell to the sorcerer Sauron’s seductive promises of power. Lured by the possibility of taking control of a world riven by tribalist self-interest, Saruman chose sides. Rather than use his magical gifts for good, Saruman aligned himself with Sauron and the various revolting beasts intent on blanketing Middle Earth under a shadow.

Tapping the palantíri, Saruman ingratiated himself with Sauron, hopeful that the magical technology will give him the influence he craves in the new dark world that the sorcerer imagines. Using the palantíri, Saruman watched as ordinary creatures, from hobbits to humans, went about their lives, learning about their whereabouts and associations, their frustrations and sources of happiness. With the seeing stone at his command, every relationship was a potential weakness, every comment a potential reason to be targeted. Nothing was unknowable.

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How Big Data and the Surveillance State Collude to Undermine Immigrant Rights