The conflict between state and federal authorities, and that between the largely docile protests sponsored by progressive organizations and the desperate fight to prevent the abduction of Los Angeles residents by masked men in vans, were not the only tensions structuring the events of the second week of June. In a bizarre twist that only the shambolic Trump could script, the president announced on June 12 that the agriculture and hospitality industries were losing “very good, long time workers … with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” as a result of ICE’s campaign; shortly after, senior ICE officials placed an immediate hold “on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.” That certain employers were finding it impossible to carry out their operations as a result of these actions surprised no one, save Trump himself.
The earlier demand of Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s mass deportation campaign, that federal agents triple the number of arrests they make—up to three thousand per day, with a goal of one million in the administration’s first year—necessitated the workplace roundups that Trump, under pressure from business owners that backed him in 2024, summarily suspended (only to cave a few days later, as if overruled by his subordinate). What the president’s jittery about-face highlights is that a large part of the undocumented labor force he and his underlings seek to drive out of the country plays an essential role in the production of food, the maintenance of hotels and restaurants, and the building of houses. If undocumented workers make up a small fraction of the total US workforce, they are critical not only to farming (including meatpacking) and leisure services, but for construction as well. Nearly three of four farmworkers in California are undocumented, and the threat of ICE raids in the Central Valley, growers lamented, resulted in up to sixty percent of laborers failing to report to work, effectively shutting down many time-sensitive farm operations.
If the most dramatic and widely-viewed roundups have occurred in urban public spaces like parks, swap meets, and Home Depot parking lots, threatening the most vulnerable immigrants working in the informal sector (street vendors, day laborers, etc.), the raids on meatpacking plants, strawberry farms, and construction sites have yielded larger, but far more economically perilous, results. The divergent effects produced through the targeting of precarious workers on the edges of the labor market and those essential to the operations of medium-to-large businesses underscore, in turn, an important divide in Trump’s fragile political “coalition.” This divide became starkly evident in the president’s oddly timed reversal. If the nasty rhetoric and the brutal images of the administration’s lawless and indiscriminate deportation efforts are produced for his petit bourgeois MAGA base, these actions run directly counter to the interests of big capital, which opportunistically signed on to the Trump 2.0 bandwagon betting on lower corporate taxes and the wholesale deregulation of their industries. If his base is made up of retirees, self-employed workers, and entrepreneurs who do not depend on a steady and ample supply of cheap labor to carry out their operations, labor-intensive industries like agriculture, hospitality, and construction cannot function without one. The images of masked men in unmarked vans kidnapping defenseless people in parking lots, or rounding up workers in factories, are fodder for a fraction of the population that has little directly at stake in the broader fallout these arrests are sure to have. If the alliance between the state and the capitalist class has historically been rooted in the former’s willingness to ensure the functioning of labor markets—disciplining labor-power while also assisting in its reproduction—the administration’s monomaniacal and punitive campaign against immigrant workers not only threatens to irrevocably damage putatively allied industries, it imperils the fragile and even improbable political coalition the president assembled in his successful campaign in 2024.
That winning combination—it will be lost on no one in the era of the Department of Government Efficiency—is completed by Silicon Valley’s tech barons, who sided with Trump 2.0 late in the game but with a clear sense of what was to be gained from the arrangement. What differentiates the tech industry from the older agriculture and construction sectors is not simply its massive market caps or these companies’ exploitation of network effects to dominate particular segments of the economy, but also the fact that it does not rely on large flows of cheap foreign labor. What the tech industry does depend on is access to exploitable consumer data, much of it generated by users of its platforms. Its canny alliance with the Trump clique has suddenly given it access to the mother lode of information collected by the federal government, data once zealously guarded and held in siloed (and aging) systems maintained by particular agencies (Social Security Administration, Internal Revenue Service, Deparment of Homeland Security, etc.). These data pools include financial and employment records, voting records, and medical histories, but also citizenship status and biometric data; until now, they have been kept separate due not only to privacy concerns encoded in legal statutes, but because access to such information depends on the assumption that it will not be used by other agencies against those who “voluntarily” supply it. The first three months of the current administration’s tenure were defined in large part by Elon Musk’s DOGE, a scorched-earth campaign whose object was not simply to render the targeted agencies dysfunctional—whence the wood chipper and the chainsaw—but above all to plunder these reserves of data, and dynamite the firewalls separating them. Musk’s campaign, seemingly authorized but not overseen by the president and his staff, was an unbelievable bonanza for his Silicon Valley complices: a kind of twenty-first century primitive accumulation of state-collected and -maintained data that could now be consolidated and processed by artificial intelligence engines, then repackaged for sale to other private companies or fed back into specialized apps designed for law enforcement and military uses.
Data plundered by the DOGE campaign have been used to create a database that allows immigration authorities at ICE and other agencies “to surveil, geolocate, and track targeted immigrants in near real time.” Recent reporting on Trump’s mass deportation campaign has revealed that immigration enforcement agencies are using a new mapping system that relies on the consolidation of data stripped out of the siloed systems DOGE penetrated in the first weeks of the new administration. This software, originally given the codename “Atrac”—short for “Alien Tracker”—and whose initial development relied heavily on DOGE employees, generates what the head of the Miami ICE office refers to as a cellphone-accessible “heat map,” which shows “where there are executable final orders of removal around the nation.”8 In April 2025, ICE also tendered a contract to Palantir Technologies—co-founded by the ghoulish Peter Thiel and currently headed by the sinister Alex Karp—to develop a complementary surveillance platform called “ImmigrationOS,” which would further consolidate this data and render these mapping apps user-friendly for field agents. Palantir’s crucial role in data mapping for immigration purposes does not date from yesterday, or even from the beginning of the second Trump administration. Its critical collaboration with ICE began as early as 2011, under the Obama administration, when it was commissioned to create a consolidated depository of records for ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division. And while the mapping software it is currently refining is for the moment being used to zero in on immigrant workers, we can be sure it is being expanded to create a vast domestic surveillance net. It will be used against critics of the current administration or against those who have publicly expressed misgivings about the genocide being carried out by the Israel Defense Forces (one of Palantir’s key clients), whose use of AI-generated heat maps in Gaza has been described by one observer as resembling a “mass assassination factory.” The tradeoff for the tech overlords’ allies in the MAGA movement, many of whom rely on the government services targeted by DOGE, seems clear: more circuses, less cake. The thrill of seeing a stranger abducted in real time on social media will be paid for by unsent Social Security checks or denied medical services sooner than they might suspect.
Jason E. Smith, "Heat Map," The Brooklyn Rail (x)
