{"id":77211,"date":"2025-11-13T08:17:24","date_gmt":"2025-11-13T16:17:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=77211"},"modified":"2025-11-13T08:17:24","modified_gmt":"2025-11-13T16:17:24","slug":"snap-freeze-continues-targeting-immigrants-more-important-than-feeding-families","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=77211","title":{"rendered":"SNAP Freeze Continues \u2014 Targeting Immigrants More Important Than Feeding Families"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By<\/span>Edward Kissam<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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With a deal in sight to end the shutdown, the Trump Administration continues its push to freeze some or all SNAP payments while upping its investment in targeting immigrants.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Collage Image by David Pham. ICE Image via Wikipedia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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As millions of Americans contend with the continued freeze on SNAP payments just as the government appears likely to reopen, the Trump Administration continues to ramp up funding for its campaign of mass deportation.<\/p>\n

Publicly available documentation shows millions in new federal contracts for Palantir, the software company helping the administration target, detain and deport immigrants.<\/p>\n

On September 19, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) exercised a $19 million option to add on to its existing Palantir contract to enhance and support its Investigative Case Management System. A week later, it announced a supplemental agreement to its contract\u2014totaling $30 million\u2014for enhancing the prototype of its ImmigrationOS system to better track, target, and detain immigrants. The next day, ICE awarded Palantir another $2 million supplement to its\u2019 ongoing contract with the company.<\/p>\n

ICE was making sure that even with the government shut down, its\u2019 deportation arm could continue full speed ahead.<\/p>\n

Yes, some of these software enhancements will be used by ICE\u2019s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Unit to support its\u2019 legitimate mission of combating drug and human trafficking by cartels. But it is just as clear that ICE\u2019s enhanced ImmigrationOS and Investigative Case Management capabilities will increasingly be used to target immigrants who are not criminals, including those who\u00a0dare to criticize government policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Syracuse University geographer, Austin Kocher, a national leader in analyzing trends in immigration enforcement, has reported that ICE arrests increased from 12,000 per month in January 2025\u2014at the end of the Biden administration\u2014to 30,000 per month in September. By September almost\u00a0half of the detained immigrants were non-criminals<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The non-criminal ICE detainees include many who were lawfully present in the U.S. such as backlogged applicants for U visas (for victims or observers of crimes who had helped law enforcement with prosecutions), backlogged applicants for T visas (victims of human trafficking), backlogged asylum applicants, other immigrant litigants subjected to expedited removal without due process, and DACA recipients.<\/p>\n

There is no tabulation of the extent to which Palantir or other vendors\u2019 software technology has been used to target, track, and detain specific individuals, but reporting shows how ICE has used the technology to\u00a0track individual air travel, driver\u2019s license scans and cell phone records<\/a>, among other pieces of data.<\/p>\n

Immigrants living and working in the U.S. legally as a result of securing Temporary Protected Status (TPS) are among the sub-groups of immigrants with \u201cfragile\u201d status who may well be the most serious victims of weaponized data intrusion. This is because they are in the USCIS system but may overnight become unauthorized because of an arbitrary decision to revoke their status and work authorization.<\/p>\n

For example, almost 9,000 Afghans had their TPS status revoked in July due to Homeland Security inexplicably determining in April that country conditions within Afghanistan had improved so they should return.\u00a0Reporting from Human Rights Watch<\/a>\u00a0shows that more than half the country\u2019s population is in need of food aid as rights for women and minorities continue to erode.<\/p>\n

Among Afghan TPS recipients are those who fled in 2021 amid the U.S. withdrawal because they had worked with U.S. and\/or international agencies to promote democracy or served as translators in military operations against the Taliban takeover of their home country.<\/p>\n

By triangulating data from multiple sources and using Palantir\u2019s AI technology, ICE can now much more easily target and track any of these Afghans\u2014alongside Haitians, Venezuelans, South Sudanese and other groups suddenly criminalized by arbitrary revocation of their status.<\/p>\n

It remains unclear what enhancements Palantir will add with the new infusion of federal dollars, and through these, what new troves of personal information\u2014in addition to MedicAid, SNAP, IRS, and SSA data\u2014will be made available to the Department of Homeland Security. What is certain is that they will lead almost certainly to more state and commercial databases being made accessible to target and track anyone, immigrant or otherwise.<\/p>\n

One example is the Department of Labor\u2019s recent attempt to access individual records from the federal-state unemployment insurance system.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis should be ringing alarm bells,\u201d Quinn Anex-Ries, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology,\u00a0told one outlet<\/a>, noting the effort comes against the backdrop of the Trump administration\u2019s \u201cpretty sprawling efforts to amass large quantities of information about everyday Americans \u2026 largely under the guise of preventing quote, unquote fraud, waste and abuse, but as we\u2019ve seen, it\u2019s been repurposed to fuel surveillance and immigration enforcement.\u201d<\/p>\n

The eventual outcomes of these multiple Trump administration efforts to access confidential personally identifiable data under authority of the Executive Orders on \u201cEliminating Waste Fraud and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos\u201d and \u201cProtecting the American People Against Invasion\u201d is still unclear, largely because they have often been rebuffed by federal judges.<\/p>\n

Still, litigation continues, though the Supreme Court majority has tended to rubber stamp assertions of executive authority.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, with the Senate having reached a deal to reopen the government after the longest shutdown in U.S. history, the ball is now in the House\u2019s hands. The Trump Administration, for its part, continues its push to freeze some or all SNAP payments while upping its investment in targeting immigrants.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ByEdward Kissam Nov 11, 2025 With...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=77211"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77212,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77211\/revisions\/77212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=77211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=77211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=77211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}