@inproceedings{owensFAccT2025,
author = {Owens, Kentrell and Eiger, Yael and Radka, Basia and Kohno, Tadayoshi and Roesner, Franziska},
title = {Understanding experiences with compulsory immigration surveillance in the U.S.},
year = {2025},
isbn = {9798400714825},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3715275.3732057},
doi = {10.1145/3715275.3732057},
abstract = {People attempting to immigrate to the U.S. (through a port of entry or other means) may be required to accept various forms of surveillance technologies after interacting with immigration officials. In March 2025, around 160,000 people in the U.S. were required to use a smartphone application—BI SmartLINK—that uses facial recognition, voice recognition, and location tracking; others were assigned an ankle monitor or a smartwatch. These compulsory surveillance technologies exist under Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE)’s Alternatives to Detention (ATD) program, a combination of surveillance technologies, home visits, and in-person meetings with ICE officials and third-party “case specialists.” For migrants in the U.S. who are already facing multiple other challenges, such as securing housing, work, or healthcare, the surveillance technologies administered under ATD introduce new challenges.To understand the challenges facing migrants using BI SmartLINK under ATD, their questions about the app, and what role technologists might play (if any) in addressing these challenges, we conducted an interview study (n=9) with immigrant rights advocates. These advocates have collectively supported thousands of migrants over their careers and witnessed firsthand their struggles with surveillance tech under ATD. Among other things, our findings highlight how surveillance tech exacerbates the power imbalance between migrants and ICE officials (or their proxies), how these technologies (negatively) impact migrants, and how migrants and their advocates struggle to understand how the technologies that surveil them function. Our findings regarding the harms experienced by migrants lead us to believe that BI SmartLINK should not be used, and these harms fundamentally cannot be addressed by improvements to the app’s functionality or design. However, as this technology is currently deployed, we end by highlighting intervention opportunities for technologists to use our findings to make these high-stakes technologies less opaque for migrants and their advocates.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency},
pages = {887–899},
numpages = {13},
location = {
},
series = {FAccT '25}
}