Immigration Enforcement Intermediaries by Chinmayi Sharma & Sam Adler

52 BYU L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2027)

Abstract

Fingerprints, facial recognition scans, genetic data, social media content, benefits documentation and more fuel the federal government's new immigration enforcement engine. At its heart is Palantir's ImmigrationOS, a platform procured by ICE in April 2025 to operate as the central hub for a sprawling mass surveillance apparatus built atop myriad public and private data streams and private sector technologies. This new machinery is the backbone of the federal government's ultimate aspiration: end-to-end automated immigration enforcement.

Immigration enforcement in the United States has long been recast as a national security project-more militant than humane, and capacious in the authorities it claims. Scholars have thoroughly documented how law denies immigrants the same rights as citizens, blesses the rapid expansion of surveillance into every aspect of immigrant lives, permits the weaponization of predictive enforcement against marginalized groups, and endows the Executive with vast, unchecked powers in the name of national security. But each of these accounts only tells a part of the story. This Article chronicles how this legal environment has permitted a harrowing new reality: an automated ecosystem of interconnected tech platforms-built and often controlled by private vendors-that persistently extracts data, funnels it to centralized repositories, and powers not just automated recommendations but automated enforcement actions. The result is a vendormediated enforcement apparatus that boxes states and the public out of meaningful participation in policymaking and circumvents democratic accountability. It has become a code-based Leviathan-cloaked in the veneer of legal legitimacy yet operating outside traditional democratic channels. 

This Article argues that private technology vendors have reshaped immigration federalism. Once a bilateral negotiation between states and the federal government, vendors have ascended as an intermediary governing node. In this vendor-mediated regime, federal policy ossifies into enforcement infrastructure: expensive-and often impossible-to unwind, enabling one administration's priorities to outlive its political mandate. The consequences of this structural realignment are stark. It not only erodes fundamental rights-due process, equal protection, and Fourth Amendment protections-but raises the specter of operational drift and surveillance normalization. Infrastructure built to monitor and detain immigrants quickly becomes a weapon that can be deployed against anyone and everyone. 

Many states have met the Trump Administration's authoritarian crescendo with resistance, but this new regime requires a different playbook. After excavating this enforcement infrastructure and identifying its pathology, this Article proposes state actions to counteract its harms to immigrants, society, and the rule of law itself.