Lawfare Daily: The Dangers of Privatized, Automated Immigration Enforcement
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 30 April 2026
⏱️ 43 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Chinmayi Sharma, an associate professor at Fordham Law School and a contributing editor at Lawfare, to discuss Sharma’s forthcoming law review article, “Immigration Enforcement Intermediaries.”
They discuss the U.S. federal government’s increasingly privatized and automated system of immigration enforcement—which Sharma describes as “a code-based Leviathan—cloaked in the veneer of legal legitimacy yet operating outside traditional democratic channels”—and how private technology vendors entrench their positions within that system. Sharma also walks through a number of proposals for states and other sub-federal entities to counteract these harms to immigrants, society, and the rule of law itself.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Because of the data and technology that these vendors provide, the federal government is getting access to information that it used to rely on states for. |
| 0:13.4 | And it is getting access to technology that means that immigration enforcement requires less manpower to do the things that the human labor did |
| 0:23.4 | before. |
| 0:24.7 | It's the Lawfare podcast. |
| 0:26.8 | I'm Tyler McBrion, managing editor of Lawfare, with Cheney Sharma, an associate professor |
| 0:31.9 | at Fordham Law School and contributing editor here at Lawfare. |
| 0:36.2 | Under the auspices of national security authorities, we've seen kind of this system being used to marginalize communities that have been marginalized under the banner of national security for a long time. |
| 0:51.8 | Today we're talking about Cheney's forthcoming law review article, Immigration Enforcement Intermediaries, |
| 0:57.5 | and the automation and privatization of U.S. federal immigration architecture. |
| 1:03.3 | So Cheney, you have a forthcoming law review paper called Immigration Enforcement Intermediaries. |
| 1:08.9 | In it, you describe the current U.S. immigration |
| 1:12.2 | enforcement system in a few ways. I'll just name two of them. You call it an automated |
| 1:19.0 | ecosystem of interconnected tech platforms. You also call it a code-based Leviathan. |
| 1:25.7 | So with those terms in mind, what is the current U.S. |
| 1:31.1 | immigration enforcement system that we have? And then briefly, we can get into it more later. |
| 1:35.6 | How did we get here? Absolutely. And like, shout out to you guys. I think that the |
| 1:41.8 | docu series that you're hosting does a great job of like not just |
| 1:45.8 | the tech infrastructure, but like broadly what is happening with the relationship of the government |
| 1:50.9 | and the private sector. But I think there's kind of three pillars here, two that are like |
| 1:58.1 | the traditional loci of power in immigration enforcement, and that's a federal |
| 2:03.7 | government and states. And then the new emerging note of power is private vendors. Private vendors |
| 2:12.2 | have been involved for a long time, but their role has fundamentally changed. And it is not because we have |
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