What if the most consequential immigration policy decisions in America aren't being made by elected officials, or even by government agencies—but by software? Right now, a sprawling ecosystem of private technology vendors is quietly reshaping who gets flagged, detained, and deported in the United States. At the center of it is Palantir's ImmigrationOS, a platform for end-to-end automated enforcement. But it’s just one piece of a much larger machine.
Today we’ll hear from the authors of a new law review article that argues that private tech vendors have become a third governing power in American immigration—sitting between the federal government and the states, encoding policy into code, and building infrastructure that increasingly poses a threat to democracy and the rule of law. Guests include: