It's a really, really big "if."
Gretchen 
ICE’s Mobile Fortify app turns facial recognition into a street-level surveillance tool aimed at non-citizens and citizens alike. In October of 2020, during the latter part of the first Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security— specifically, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released a smartphone app with AI facial recognition capability. CBP claims that close to a … Read more
In all of the horrific stories surrounding the killing of Renee Good by ICE officer Jonathan Ross, I haven’t seen much speculation about why he was not only filming her with his smartphone at the time, but did so while moving around the front of her car, and even using it to record himself in … Read more
A few days ago, J.D. Vance accused Ilhan Omar of “immigration fraud.” She responded in a statement that began: “This is rich coming from someone who literally said they were willing to ‘create stories’ to redirect the media,” referring to Vance’s own admission to spreading the lie that Haitian immigrants eat people’s pets in September of 2024, … Read more
This May, the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology released an updated version of an already alarming evaluation of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s handling of data. The introduction to the new version comments on their prescience: “When we published American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century in 2022, we understood that the surveillance … Read more
The intersection of healthcare and immigration policy is found in the halls of hospitals and clinics across America, where increasing numbers of International Medical Graduates (IMGs) are filling in for doctors who won’t return, and state governments are doing their best to usher IMGs into practice where they’re sorely needed. Help (Badly) Wanted: Foreign Doctors … Read more
The language used to justify policy is…fraught. Every new program is a triumph, as is every cut to an existing one. Every new rule is a sea change, and every executive order a roadmap to utopia. These flowery-but-decisive statements come from all politicians, pointing in all directions, and they always have. But in the United … Read more
Generative AI isn’t supposed to have opinions. Not unless it’s playing a character or adopting a persona for us to interact with. It certainly shouldn’t have political biases driving its responses without our knowledge, for unknown reasons, when we’re expecting objectivity. So when we learn that a generative AI model has been programmed for bias, … Read more
It’s infuriating that I have to defend this profoundly unjust yet unfairly maligned, rights-violating, prison gate-keeping, Hollerith-ass, bureaucratic government-enforced insult to human dignity in app form, but here we are. On Inauguration Day, January 20th, one of the first things Trump did was cancel the CBP One app— an app developed by Customs and Border … Read more
One of my first-year classes in college was History of Theater, in which I learned how the Greeks built amphitheaters into hillsides, carving out a semicircle of seating for the audience around the stage to maximize. The scenery for a play completes the circle, just as it does for any show in an amphitheater today. … Read more
Quick recap In my last post (Down the patient portal: the world of healthcare tech serving you data about you) I introduced the back end of patient engagement from the patient’s perspective. While you can’t choose the digital patient engagement tools your provider uses, you can often choose your provider— and different providers may be … Read more