I'm your host, Blake Montgomery, currently enjoying Shirley Jackson's eerie final novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Surveillance is industrializing and privatizing. My colleagues Johana Bhuiyan and Jose Olivares report on the companies aiding Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, which are running a victory lap after their latest quarterly financial reports: Palantir, the tech firm, and Geo Group and CoreCivic, the private prison and surveillance companies, said this week that they brought in more money than Wall Street expected them to, thanks to the administration's crackdown on immigrants. "Well, as usual, I've been cautioned to be a little modest about our bombastic numbers," said Alex Karp, the Palantir chief executive, in an investor call earlier this week. Then he crowed about the company's "extraordinary numbers" and his "enormous pride" in its success.

The United States under President Donald Trump is ramping up use of surveillance systems and artificial intelligence (AI) to track and arrest immigrants, raising fears that risks to accuracy and privacy could put almost anyone in danger of getting caught up in the crackdown. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other immigration control agencies are using a suite of AI tools -- such as facial recognition scanners in public areas and robotic dogs patrolling the southern border for human movement -- as part of the crackdown on alleged illegal immigration. Many of the AI tools that immigration agents are using have been in place for years and are a legacy of previous administrations, according to Saira Hussain, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group.