During the Cold War, among the most vivid symbols of Eastern Bloc dictatorships were the walls, wires and armed guards keeping citizens in their countries.
The people weren’t free to leave places like the USSR and East Germany. And people who weren’t free to leave, from the American perspective, obviously weren’t free at all. Their walls and checkpoints symbolized their repression.
That's what we used to think.
Now the new walls are on our border with Mexico, and the checkpoints are scattered throughout Southern Arizona, with border officers and immigration agents manning them. Even active-duty soldiers are wandering the terrain.
The idea, of course, is to keep unwanted foreigners out. It's to preserve Americans' safety.
Increasingly, though, it's becoming clear that the same infrastructure that keeps people out can be used to keep people in. And the technologies used to control our borders can be used to control us.
In recent weeks agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement have been questioning drivers, and asking for immigration documents, before southbound vehicles exit Arizona through the DeConcini port in Nogales. Some shopkeepers on Grand Avenue, just north of the port of entry, say heightened immigration enforcement at the border is deterring Mexican shoppers from doing their holiday shopping in Nogales, Ariz. "The businesses here are becoming like a ghost town," said Lidia Lopez of Sam's Perfumes and Fashion.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who are assigned to enforce immigration laws in the country's interior, have recently joined border agents at ports of entry like Nogales, as my colleague Emily Bregel reported Dec. 21. They've been watching people heading outbound to Mexico, in an apparent effort to catch people who were in the United States illegally before they leave and formally deport them.
Such outbound inspections contributed to long lines for people heading into Mexico during the Christmas season, sometimes longer than the lines for people going into the United States.
This is the opposite of the usual situation. Generally, there are long lines south of the border for people heading into the United States, as American officials inspect everyone to a greater or lesser degree. Going southbound, Mexican border officials usually don't inspect most vehicles at the border, meaning traffic flows slowly but smoothly.
We can expect more of this: On Dec. 26, the Department of Homeland Security put in place a new rule forcing all non-citizens to allow themselves to have their photograph taken for biometric-data searches when they leave the country. This doesn't just mean people illegally in the country — it means all the millions of legal permanent residents and other visa holders, too.
But not citizens, yet.
"Although U.S. citizens are not covered by this rule, they may continue to voluntarily participate in the facial biometrics process at entry and exit," DHS said in a press release on the new rule. "U.S. citizens who prefer to opt out of the facial biometrics process may simply notify a CBP officer or airline representative and undergo manual inspection of their passport, as required for international travel."
Spreading surveillance
This may seem small — people leaving the country by airplane already routinely have their facial biometrics taken. And when passing through Transportation Security Administration checkpoints at the airport, you may be asked to voluntarily have your face scanned when agents check your ID.
But these biometric checks are part of spreading surveillance by the federal government that does not just affect non-citizens. This spread was already happening under previous administrations, but under the Trump administration, it has accelerated.
Big Tech company Palantir has won a series of large contracts to help agencies analyze the government's vast data troves quickly. Most notoriously, this has been used in immigration enforcement. Palantir has developed what it calls ImmigrationOS to identify, track and help the government deport people.
But Palantir's system for analyzing government data goes far beyond immigration uses. It has been used to analyze the taxpayer data in the hands of the Internal Revenue Service, one of the most sensitive stores of all Americans' personal and financial information.
CEO Alex Karp has defined the mission of the company as defending "the West" and made common cause with the Trump administration despite being a self-described "progressive." In May, a group of 13 former Palantir employees wrote an open letter accusing him of "normalizing authoritarianism under the guise of a 'revolution' led by oligarchs."
'Inspection' can be invasive
I'm writing this column during a quick trip to Mexico. No American officials inspected our vehicle on the way out, but we can expect at minimum a scan of our documents that brings up information about our travels, and who knows what else, on the way back.
"Inspection" is a relatively benign word for what may be either a cursory process or an incredibly invasive one. And one of the key things Americans don't realize is it can happen either when you're entering the country or leaving.
In a given inspection, you might just get your passport scanned, or you might be kept for hours, interrogated and subject to scans of your body. Officers may demand your phone and review or even download its contents.
The number of inspections of electronic devices increased to 16,173 in the quarter ended Sept. 30, up by about 28% from the 12,658 such inspections in the equivalent quarter in 2024.
When you're being inspected, it's not just your citizenship and travels that may become relevant to federal agents. It could be the content of your social media posts, or your friendships as documented by your emails, texts and social network.
In fact, the State Department has made a show of canceling the visas of some people who had made what the government deemed were unacceptable posts about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
When people enter the United States, we increasingly open ourselves up to this sort of invasive inspection that goes beyond whether your documents are in order. But entering the country, it's something we expect.
Now, the same is becoming true when people leave the country by land. For now, the policies are just focused on non-citizens, and they're irregularly applied. But it only takes one turn of the dial for us all to become subject to these same federal checks of our biometric data before we're allowed to leave the country.
And then it's one more turn of the dial for personal connections or political viewpoints to be part of the screening.
These are the kinds of policies we used to decry when they happened in our enemies' lands. But as Americans allow themselves to be convinced our safety depends on giving up our personal information, we risk becoming what we used to condemn.
