Paromita Shah is a cofounder and the executive director of Just Futures Law, an organization that uses litigation, policy, and advocacy to combat the surveillance of Black and Brown communities, provide legal defense for immigrant organizers, and dismantle the detention, deportation, and criminalization of immigrant communities. We discuss what it means to use the law for abolitionist work. Paromita explores how her immigrant parents’ political beliefs, her experiences during and after 9/11, and her work to stop one of the Department of Homeland Security’s earliest data-sharing programs have shaped how she thinks about movement lawyering and technology. She also describes Just Futures Law’s approach to cutting through corporate tech propaganda to have a conversation about tech policy that centers community interests.
Hannah Lucal: We first met doing tech surveillance work at Just Futures Law (JFL). As a movement lawyer and leader in immigrant rights for decades, how have you come to focus on technology?
Paromita Shah: I didn’t start off as a movement lawyer. I began as an immigration lawyer representing immigrant survivors of domestic violence and asylum seekers. I heard harrowing stories from people experiencing enormous flux and tragedy who made a life-affirming choice to journey to the United States. What drives people to leave everything that they have ever known, the families that they love, the people who know and care for them? As a child of immigrants, it is a question that has always lived in my brain.
I came to movement lawyering because of my immigrant parents’ beliefs about principled struggle and justice. They shaped my understanding of immigrant exploitation, genocide, colonialism, racism, and the idea that humans can eradicate histories and peoples for profit and empire. They started their lives in the US in St. Louis during the middle of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, after leaving a country that had freed itself from British imperialism twenty years earlier. Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, Erich Fromm, Mahatma Gandhi, and many others were required reading in our home.
But it was 9/11 that made my parents’ teachings real. I saw people who looked like me shoved aside, disappeared, and pushed into a detention center. Within weeks, the US churned out a security state in the name of national security, patriotism, and unity. Nine-eleven made it clear to me how the violence of the state can move.
As an immigration lawyer, I had to help my clients get off a security list that we could neither examine nor challenge. Surveillance, data extraction, and vetting were combined with no-fly lists, government registration for Muslim men,1 no-bond detention, and the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. My clients needed more than legal terminology and an immigration case; they needed to know how to navigate an inaccessible, violent system that was being deployed not only against the person that they love who is being incarcerated but against their entire family. That made me realize we were not looking at unfair outcomes; we were looking at a systemic problem of deportation, mass incarceration, and criminalization.
Hannah: Nine-eleven was also a moment of increased funding for surveillance technologies to justify criminalizing and deporting Arab and Muslim communities,2 the latest iteration of a long legacy of racialized surveillance.3
Paromita: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was established in 2003,4 and it was homegrown to be a paramilitary institution. Today it is a $62 billion agency5 that has more armed agents than any department outside of the Department of Defense.6 I regularly went to meetings with DHS. Often they were focused on identifying and locking up immigrants who had any contact with the criminal justice system, from arrests to prisons. This is why, five years after its formation, they launched Secure Communities—a fingerprint-data-sharing system with the FBI.7 It was portrayed as a huge advancement in technology.8 Before, when you were booked by a police officer, your fingerprints went to the FBI to check for outstanding warrants. With Secure Communities, your fingerprints were sent to DHS to check your immigration status. This enabled DHS to have the police hold people so ICE would eventually pick them up and put them into removal proceedings.9 It massively expanded deportations and went way beyond whatever “targets” they had in mind; because that was never the intention. It swept in so many people.10
This collusion between DHS and local police was also big business. At the same time DHS grew, prisons grew.11 The federal government paid a lot for people to be held in state prisons.12 States like Georgia, Texas, and Alabama followed their lead and were like, “Yes, let’s have a racialized discussion about immigration and also incarcerate them.”13 It created fear, further separated families, and destabilized communities.
Hannah: Isn’t Secure Communities still in place?
Paromita: The tool that propped up Secure Communities was an “immigration detainer”—a piece of paper from DHS asking the police to hold someone. It was treated as an order, not a request. Once we learned about it, we made it an Achilles’ heel. Groups like the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, Mijente, Immigrant Legal Resource Center, Immigrant Defense Project, and so many others launched campaigns—and eventually litigation—for cities to stop complying with immigration detainers.14
So, yes, even though Secure Communities still exists in practice,15 we exposed the government's misrepresentations about the program and birthed detainer campaigns, the foundation for sanctuary cities, and forced the government to change its enforcement practices. DHS misrepresented that cities could opt out of data collection16 and said there were civil rights protections.17 So communities took charge of their own safety and demanded cities stand for them. That is how we’ve curtailed the abuses of Secure Communities in Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Washington, DC, New York, Boston—all these places.18
Hannah: How do you think about using the law to abolish surveillance and policing given that many people would say the law should also be abolished?
Paromita: I understand why people are frustrated about the law. If you want to make law a weapon, you have to be aware of its limits and strengths. Law is a tactic, not a savior. The legacies of genocide and slavery are embedded in the law.19 The law is imbued with the idea that human beings are disposable; because we have execution as punishment, and we have prisons.
What happens if you use the court to strengthen community organizing campaigns? It is the job of lawyers to go beyond accountability measures, audits, and oversight mechanisms to establish different principles in the law that value people to the fullest extent of their dignity and needs. In the meantime, legal work can be powerful if used with community power.
The law is imbued with the idea that human beings are disposable; because we have execution as punishment, and we have prisons.
Hannah: At the heart of those systems of punishment that the law upholds, there is the profit model and there is anti-Blackness. I think people don’t always think about the immigration system as part of the anti-Black carceral state right away. How does the tech industry not only profit from but actually expand criminalization, surveillance, deportation, and detention targeting Black people, specifically Black immigrants?
Paromita: The settler government, the United States, persists in dominating land, labor, and resources. Incarceration, slavery, exploiting Chinese labor to build railroads,20 exploiting Mexican farmworkers for our food21—those are examples of racialized social control that require elimination protocols like jails, arrest, and deportation.
Borders are sites of technological experiments, and migrants are increasingly blamed as the source of economic scarcity that people are experiencing. Corporations are taking advantage of that xenophobia and contracting with federal and local governments to build “smart border technologies” that capture your face at migrant camps, track your “emotions,” or vacuum information off your phone.22 Many of these systems have their roots in wartime technologies. None are focused on saving lives. Smart border technologies didn’t stop over 600 migrants from dying off the coast of Greece.23 Hannah: That was never the goal.
Borders are sites of technological experiments.
Paromita: Right? They’re not going to use technology to protect people from dying at borders.
Hannah: So when it comes to tech policy, we are talking about systems of racialized social control being further cemented.
Paromita: Do we have tech policy, or do we have corporations putting out ideas that cement their power? Companies are designing tech policy that will give them an endless supply of federal money. Let’s be honest: we have not yet had a conversation about tech policy.
Do we have tech policy, or do we have corporations putting out ideas that cement their power?
Hannah: What is the conversation about tech policy that you want to have?
Paromita: The only conversation we’re having about tech policy is around like, The Terminator. What disturbed me about this AI frenzy, which has been masquerading as tech policy, is how easily our governments consumed it. Will tech become an artificial sentient being that disables our military security systems and launches nuclear bombs? But in the meantime, they’re okay deploying a robot dog in the Bronx.24 Will tech save the planet? But right now tech companies are building data farms that steal water and electricity from communities.25
While corporations are lobbying for pro-corporate policy and procurement money, they are also exploiting a narrative that “technology for good” is their purview. Yet, they have passed anti-privacy policies in fourteen-plus states.26 Lobbyists clamor about the fear of reducing innovation—you can see that in the newest executive order which highlights innovation first, rights second.27 The crisis is not The Terminator; the crisis is that tech is unregulated. We need communities to set the substance of tech policies so that tech is an asset for communities, not corporations. Governments should focus less on the big-tech talking heads and venture capitalists and engage with organized communities who understand their needs and how to solve them. To do this, we need a disciplined shift away from weak, ineffective policies that focus solely on mitigating risk—such as risk to privacy or transparency—and that rely on carve-outs for law enforcement, immigration, or crime. Hannah: How does JFL apply abolition values to tech policy work?
Paromita: We look to the horizon when we will not have prisons, police, bans, or walls. We have a framework that tech policy is developed by people who are most impacted by it. We think beyond the current parameters for tech policy, which are limited to privacy protections—which don’t cover most noncitizens—and civil rights, or how we can persuade corporations to do better. Already, we see our government has made massive exceptions in tech policies to allow law enforcement and national security agencies to decide when to exempt themselves from the rules.28
Of course, transparency, oversight, and risk assessments matter, but they don’t impact how communities can change the systems being pushed on them. They rely on the assumption that you have to trade your rights for the benefit of the technology. Why should we trade away information about where you live, who you know, your license, your school? You have to surrender your face, your fingerprints, your biometric data to travel in an airport.29 All of this is to obtain a benefit that used to exist before these tools did.
Hannah: I appreciate this principle of refusal with technology. I have seen that happen most at the local policy level.30 I also see the way that the industry has co-opted and pushed the conversation around privacy and civil rights to strengthen their power, and to eliminate the option of refusal.
Paromita: Yes! You’re asked: Do you want to opt out of data collection so you can access this article? Opt-outs are a fakeout, because the industry wants to push people into their products with fewer ways to get out. What most of these industries need, to have their tools work, is data. They need high computing power, data, labor, and energy. We’re beginning to see reports that data is running out,31 and the fact that many of these datasets are held by corporations puts pressure on our government to make toxic decisions about what we can opt out of. At the end of the day, there was no opt-out for Secure Communities.32
Community organizing power should be driving policy, so it doesn’t just live in the Washington, DC beltway and the tokenizing that comes with it. There’s a bad habit of adding impacted groups to the table without having them develop policy, even though communities are the brain of our movements. If you have a community base driving policymaking, you understand the red lines. For example, I want to make sure that local cities have a chance to build out a good tech policy, and I’ll walk away if federal legislation bans that.
Corporations are using tech as an extension of state power. We need to see data as a public resource—like water or air—not a commodity. If you see technology as a resource for everyone, the policies that flow from that are entirely different. We could develop participatory governance systems for technology that go beyond privacy, civil rights, and oversight and further community interests, not the interests of tech and defense industries.
We need to see data as a public resource—like water or air—not a commodity.
1. On the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, see Rights Working Group and the Center for Immigrants’ Rights, The NSEERS Effect: A Decade of Racial Profiling, Fear, and Secrecy, Pennsylvania State University’s Dickinson School of Law, May 2012, pennstatelaw.psu.edu.
2. See, for example, Jessica Katzenstein, Total Information Awareness: The High Costs of Post-9/11 U.S. Mass Surveillance, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, September 26, 2023, watson.brown.edu; Rights Working Group and the Center for Immigrants’ Rights, NSEERS; Diala Shamas and Nermeen Arastu, Mapping Muslims: NYPD Spying and Its Impact on American Muslims, Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility project, City University of New York School of Law, 2013, law.cuny.edu.
3. See, for example, Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); Katzenstein, Total Information Awareness.
4. “Creation of the Department of Homeland Security,” Department of Homeland Security, May 8, 2023, dhs.gov.
5. “FY 2025 Budget in Brief,” Department of Homeland Security, n.d., dhs.gov.
6. Connor Brooks, “Federal Law Enforcement Officers, 2020 – Statistical Tables,” US Department of Justice, updated September 2023, bjs.ojp.gov; Adam Andrzejewski and Thomas W. Smith, The Militarization of The U.S. Executive Agencies: Non-military Purchases of Guns, Ammunition, and Military-Style Equipment FY2015–FY2019, OpenTheBooks, December 2020, openthebooks.com.
7. “Secure Communities,” US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, May 10, 2024, ice.gov.
8. “Secure Communities Crash Course,” US Customs and Immigration Enforcement, 2009, ice.gov.
9. “Secure Communities: A Fact Sheet,” American Immigration Council, November 29, 2011, americanimmigrationcouncil.org.
10. See, for example, “Opposing the DHS-ICE Secure Communities Program,” American Public Health Association, October 30, 2012, apha.org; Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes and Mary J. Lopez, “Immigration Policy, Immigrant Detention, and the U.S. Jail System,” Criminology and Public Policy 21, no. 2 (May 2022): 433–60; Lee Romney and Paloma Esquivel, “Noncriminals Swept Up in Federal Deportation Program,” Los Angeles Times, April 25, 2011, latimes.com.
11. See, for example, Livia Luan, “Profiting from Enforcement: The Role of Private Prisons in U.S. Immigration Detention,” Migration Policy Institute, May 2, 2018, migrationpolicy.org; Mary Small, “A Toxic Relationship: Private Prisons and U.S. Immigration Detention,” Detention Watch Network, December 2016, detentionwatchnetwork.org; Eunice Hyunhye Cho, “More of the Same: Private Prison Corporations and Immigration Detention under the Biden Administration,” American Civil Liberties Union, October 5, 2021, aclu.org.
12. National Immigrant Justice Center, Cut the Contracts: It’s Time to End ICE’s Corrupt Detention Management System, March 2021, immigrantjustice.org.
13. National Immigrant Justice Center, Cut the Contracts.
14. See, for example, “Legal Issues with Detainer Campaigns,” Immigrant Legal Resource Center, November 2016, ilrc.org; “END S-COMM: Alto Polimigra!,” National Day Laborer Organizing Network, 2019, ndlon.org; “Ending Police Collaboration with Mass Deportation Programs: PEP, ICE Out of Rikers, and Ending S-Comm,” Immigrant Defense Project, immigrantdefenseproject.org.
15. “Criminal Apprehension Program,” US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, May 3, 2023, ice.gov.
16. See, for example, Shankar Vedantam, “Local Jurisdictions Find They Can’t Opt Out of Federal Immigration Enforcement Program,” Washington Post, September 30, 2010, washingtonpost.com; Romney and Esquivel, “Noncriminals”; American Public Health Association, “Opposing.”
17. “Missing the Point: ICE’s Secure Communities ‘Reforms’ Ignore Real Problems,” National Immigrant Justice, June 28, 2011, immigrantjustice.org.
18. See, for example, Lena Graber, Angie Junck, and Nikki Marquez, “Local Options for Protecting Immigrants: A Collection of City and County Policies to Protect Immigrants from Discrimination and Deportation,” Immigrant Legal Resource Center, December 15, 2016, ilrc.org; Krsna Avila et al., “The Rise of Sanctuary: Getting Local Officers Out of the Business of Deportations in the Trump Era,” Immigrant Legal Resource Center, January 2018, ilrc.org; “State Map on Immigration Enforcement,” Immigrant Legal Resource Center, October 31, 2024, ilrc.org.
19. “The Legal Profession Must Confront Its Role In Slavery,” Citing Slavery Project, citingslavery.org; Ruth Hopkins, “The Indian Removal Act Was Used by the U.S. Government to Commit Ethnic Cleansing,” TeenVogue, May 28, 2021, teenvogue.com.
20. Jim McMahan, “For Over a Century and a Half: Chinese Workers Abused and Superexploited in U.S.,” Workers World, March 25, 2021, workers.org.
21. Marjorie Zatz, “Using and Abusing Mexican Farmworkers: The Bracero Program and the INS,” Law and Society Review 27, no. 4 (1993): 851–64.
22. Mizue Aizeki et al., “Smart Borders or a Humane World?,” Immigrant Defense Project and the Transnational Institute, October 6, 2021, tni.org.
23. Hibai Arbide Aza and María Martín, “Greece Imposes Silence around Shipwreck of Overcrowded Migrant Boat,” El Pais, June 20, 2023, english.elpais.com.
24. Karen Matthews, “Robotic Police Dog ‘Digidog’ Rejoins NYPD,” PBS News, April 12, 2023, pbs.org.
25. Olivia Solon, “Drought-Stricken Communities Push Back against Data Centers,” NBC News, June 19, 2021, nbcnews.com.
26. Caitriona Fitzgerald, Kara Williams, and R. J. Cross, The State of Privacy: How State “Privacy” Laws Fail to Protect Privacy and What They Can Do Better, Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and US PIRG Information Fund, February 2024, epic.org.
27. “Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence,” The White House, October 30, 2023, whitehouse.gov.
28. See, for example, “Executive Order” and “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights: Making Automated Systems Work for the American People,” White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, October 2022, whitehouse.gov; Erin Murphy, “The Politics of Privacy in the Criminal Justice System: Information Disclosure, the Fourth Amendment, and Statutory Law Enforcement Exemptions,” Michigan Law Review 111, no. 4 (2013): 485–548; Müge Fazlioglu, “Filling the Void? The 2023 State Privacy Laws and Consumer Health Data,” International Association of Privacy Professionals, March 28, 2023, iapp.org.
29. “Say hello to the new face of security, safety and efficiency,” US Customs and Border Protection, updated September 2024, cbp.gov; “Biometric Entry-Exit H-1B and L-1 Fees Spend Plan,” Department of Homeland Security, September 18, 2023, dhs.gov. 30. “Ban Facial Recognition,” Fight for the Future, banfacialrecognition.com. 31. Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly, “A.I. Companies Are Running Out of Training Data: Study,” Observer, July 19, 2024, observer.com. 32. Julián Aguilar, “Feds: Secure Communities Not Optional,” Texas Tribune, August 5, 2011, texastribune.org.