Surveillance Without a Warrant: Legal Experts Say the Fourth Amendment Is the Last Line of Defence

By Tariq Khan | Pakistan Chronicle | 16 September 2026

SAN FRANCISCO — American Community Media convened a three-hour media briefing at the World Affairs Center on 312 Sutter Street on 10 September, bringing together attorneys, researchers and civil liberties advocates to examine what organisers called the stealth chapter in the war on immigrants: an immigration enforcement apparatus now built on facial recognition, drones, licence plate readers and artificial intelligence, operating largely outside judicial supervision.

A briefing convened at a moment of escalation

Opening the session, ACoM collaborator and researcher Ed Kissam set out the historical context for a panel titled “From Immigration Enforcement to Political Monitoring”. The framing offered by organisers was blunt: an unprecedented allocation of funds through the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” has enabled what they described as the unsupervised and inappropriate use of surveillance technology by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Roughly 120,000 Flock cameras now operate across the United States, conducting some 20 billion scans every month. ICE and Customs and Border Protection have repeatedly drawn on that data to pursue immigrants without warrants.

This was ACoM’s second briefing on the subject. The first, held in February and titled “No Place Left to Hide”, was followed by seven months in which, organisers said, the pace of surveillance technology outstripped the ability of journalists and lawyers to track it.

“Arrest first, justify later”

Stephen Manning, executive director of the Innovation Law Lab, an adjunct professor at Lewis & Clark Law School and named the most innovative lawyer in North America for 2017 by the Financial Times, was asked to walk the room through Operation Black Rose — a Department of Homeland Security operation launched in Oregon in October 2025 that pairs facial recognition, drones and other surveillance tools with warrantless arrests of immigrants and, as organisers put it, of those who simply look like immigrants. The operating policy has been characterised as “arrest first, justify later”.

The scale is not incidental. A New York Times analysis found DHS made 43,000 arrests nationwide in June and 49,000 in July. Manning was asked to discuss two Oregon cases now before the state’s federal court: M.J.M.A., an asylum seeker, and Victor Cruz Gamez, a decades-long resident, father and grandfather. Both have sued DHS.

When software decides who has an “immigration nexus”

Central to the Oregon litigation is an application known as ELITE. The Guardian reported that an officer testified the tool functions “kind of like Google Maps”, displaying how many people believed to have an “immigration nexus” are present in a given area. The definition of that term is broad enough to potentially sweep in naturalised citizens — a point of direct consequence for Pakistani American families, in which citizens, permanent residents and visa holders frequently share a single household and a single postcode.

Panellists were pressed on what training standards should apply to agents operating tools such as ELITE, and on whether surveillance misuse is genuinely driving adverse judgments against the government or whether conventional questions of reasonable suspicion in traffic stops and public arrests are still doing the real legal work.

The constitutional question

Saira Hussain, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has represented travellers challenging border searches of their smartphones, racial justice protesters contesting live camera monitoring, and Asian community leaders challenging dragnet surveillance of customers’ utility data. She was asked how DHS misuse of public and commercial datasets — the feedstock for AI models that target immigrant neighbourhoods — might be reined in.

One statistic framed the constitutional debate: roughly 0.01 per cent of vehicles scanned by automated licence plate readers are ever connected to any wrongdoing. The question put to the panel was whether mass, suspicionless scanning is itself the constitutional defect, or whether the problem lies in how the resulting data is subsequently shared and used. With Congress yet to regulate these technologies, organisers noted, Fourth Amendment challenges remain very nearly the only recourse available.

Oversight at the municipal level

Brian Hofer, executive director of Secure Justice, has driven surveillance reform in close to 100 jurisdictions, helping establish oversight committees and draft ordinances. He traced the line from Oakland’s proposed Domain Awareness Center in 2014 to today’s licence plate reader networks. Flock reduced its data retention period from 30 days to seven on 13 August.

Notably, the sharpest recent pushback has come from Republican governors. Texas Governor Greg Abbott directed police departments to stop spending state money on Flock Safety cameras, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ordered the systems removed from state roads, describing the technology as “out of control”.

Abdi Soltani, executive director of the ACLU of Northern California, was asked what effective local oversight looks like in practice, and why California — with some of the strongest state privacy protections in the country — is still seeing warrantless, surveillance-driven arrests. That gap, he was asked to address, may reveal the limits of state law standing alone.

Why this matters here

For Pakistani American readers the warning is direct. Surveillance systems do not distinguish between citizen and non-citizen at the point of collection; they distinguish afterwards, if at all. Panellists repeatedly returned to the argument that immigrants are the canaries in the coal mine. The closing question put to every speaker was what must change — and what role journalism can play in making that change possible.