The Digital Frontier: Protecting Latino Civil Rights in the Age of Algorithms
Juan Proaño
Chief Executive Officer
League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC)
The tech industry likes to imagine itself above politics. Engineers design tools. Companies sell them. Governments decide how they will be used. It is a comforting story. It allows everyone to believe responsibility lives somewhere else. But technology does not exist outside society. It exists inside it — inside police departments, immigration agencies, courtrooms, and bureaucracies. It operates in the same landscape where power, race, and inequality already shape outcomes. For Latino communities and other racial and ethnic minorities, that reality is impossible to ignore.
No doubt, innovation can expand opportunity, but at the same time, it can also expand surveillance. When powerful data systems intersect with policing or immigration enforcement, the stakes are no longer theoretical: they become practical questions about civil rights.
Consider the debate surrounding Amazon’s facial recognition system, Rekognition. In 2018, civil rights advocates began warning that facial recognition tools could easily become inaccurate and biased instruments of mass surveillance, especially in communities already watched closely by the state. Their concerns were grounded in evidence: researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that several facial recognition systems were far less accurate when identifying people with darker skin tones.[1] That same year, the American Civil Liberties Union ran a public test and discovered that Rekognition incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress to mugshot databases, and most of those false matches involved lawmakers from racial and ethnic minority groups.[2]
The technology was not neutral. It carried bias in its design and in its outcomes. By 2020, the controversy had grown large enough that Amazon announced a moratorium on police use of Rekognition in criminal investigations.[3] The company imposed what was supposed to be a one-year pause on the program, but the pause is still in effect six years later.[4] The moment revealed something important: companies do have the power to draw lines when civil rights are at stake. Those lines should not appear only when controversy erupts. They should exist from the beginning.
Simply put, companies have a responsibility to consider the civil rights impacts of the technology they create or use. Tech companies should establish firm rules about how their tools can and cannot be used in immigration enforcement. Without those boundaries, technologies drift into new purposes. A system designed for identity verification can become a surveillance device. A database intended for security can quietly become an instrument of immigration control.
The danger lies not only in the technology itself but in the quiet way systems expand. Tools migrate. Databases merge. Information moves between agencies. Surveillance grows gradually, often without public debate.
We have already seen how small errors can carry enormous consequences. In one immigration enforcement encounter, officers using facial recognition software received only a “possible match.” The system did not confirm the identity; it merely suggested one. Yet the suggestion influenced the decision to detain the individual. The machine hesitated, but the human officers moved forward anyway.[5]
The same pattern has appeared in the federal government’s CBP One application that asylum seekers must use to request appointments at the border. Migrants have reported repeated failures when attempting to verify their identities through the app’s facial recognition system.[6] Applicants with darker skin tones have described difficulty submitting photographs that the system will accept.[7] What appears to the programmer as a technical inconvenience becomes, in practice, a barrier to asylum. In such moments, technology becomes policy.
That is why companies must take due diligence before selling surveillance technologies to government agencies. The tech industry often moves quickly. Products are built, released, and refined in the name of innovation while ethical questions are postponed until they become an emergency, and by then, the damage is done. But biometric systems are not ordinary software tools. When they fail, they do not simply crash. They reshape lives.
There is a path forward. Tech companies should conduct and publish civil rights impact assessments before deploying surveillance tools. They should study how their products perform across racial and ethnic groups. They should analyze how those tools might be used in immigration enforcement. And they should make those findings public. Transparency is not an inconvenience. It is a responsibility. And that means prohibiting the use of technology or not developing it in the first place where the risks to civil rights are too high.
Pressure for this kind of accountability has begun to emerge from within the technology industry itself. In 2018, thousands of employees at Google protested the company’s participation in Project Maven, a Pentagon initiative using AI to analyze drone footage.[8] According to the 2018 article “Google Employees Quit in Protest Over Military Artificial Intelligence Program,” more than 3,000 employees signed a petition opposing the project and several engineers resigned in protest.[9] Their actions forced the company to reconsider its role. Google ultimately declined to renew the contract and later adopted internal principles governing how its AI technologies could be used.[10] The protest revealed something important: the people who build these technologies understand their moral weight.
Shareholders are beginning to recognize that weight as well. Tech companies depend on trust as much as innovation. When a firm becomes associated with civil rights violations, whether through wrongful identification, immigration surveillance, or discriminatory algorithms, public trust erodes quickly — not just trust of that company, but of AI as a whole. Reputation is not simply a public relations issue. It is a market reality.
For Latino communities, these debates are not abstract policy arguments. Immigration enforcement in the U.S. already relies heavily on digital infrastructure, including databases, biometric records, and information sharing between agencies. When technologies such as facial recognition and predictive analytics are layered onto that infrastructure, the result can resemble a new form of policing. It is quieter and more automated, but it remains powerful.
Innovation itself is not the enemy. Technology can serve the public good: it can locate missing children, expose corruption, and strengthen democratic institutions. But innovation without restraint risks magnifying the inequalities that already exist within our institutions.
In the end, the question is not whether technology will advance. It will. The real question is whether the people who build it will pause long enough to ask who pays the price when it fails.
For many Latino families, that question carries an old and familiar anxiety. It is the fear of being mistaken for someone else in the eyes of the government. Once that mistake came from a paper file or a clerical error. Today, it may come from an algorithm. Machines may calculate quickly. Justice still requires judgment. And judgment in a democracy requires humility.
[1] Larry Hardesty, “Study Finds Gender and Skin-Type Bias in Commercial Artificial-Intelligence Systems,” MIT News (Feb. 11, 2018), https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-finds-gender-skin-type-bias-artificial-intelligence-systems-0212.
[2] Jacob Snow, “Amazon’s Face Recognition Falsely Matched 28 Members of Congress With Mugshots,” The American Civil Liberties Union (July 26, 2018), https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/amazons-face-recognition-falsely-matched-28.
[3] Bobby Allyn, “Amazon Halts Police Use off Its Facial Recognition Technology,” NPR (June 10, 2020), https://www.npr.org/2020/06/10/874418013/amazon-halts-police-use-of-its-facial-recognition-technology.
[4] Fangzhou Cheng and Marcel Pividal, “Transitioning from Amazon Rekognition People Pathing: Exploring Other Alternatives,” Amazon Web Services Blog (Oct. 24, 2024), https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/transitioning-from-amazon-rekognition-people-pathing-exploring-other-alternatives/.
[5] Dell Cameron and Maddy Varner, “ICE and CBP’s Face-Recognition App Can’t Actually Verify Who People Are,” WIRED (Feb. 5, 2026), https://www.wired.com/story/cbp-ice-dhs-mobile-fortify-face-recognition-verify-identity/.
[6] Bernd Debusmann Jr, “At US Border, Tech Issues Plague New Migrant Applications,” The BBC (March 8, 2023), https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64814095.
[7] Id.
[8] Scott Shane and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “The Business of War: Google Employees Protest Work for the Pentagon,” The New York Times (April 4, 2018), https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-ceo-pentagon-project.html.
[9] Sam Harnett, “Google Employees Quit in Protest Over Military Artificial Intelligence Program,” KQED (May 17, 2018), https://www.kqed.org/news/11668872/google-employees-quit-in-protest-over-military-artificial-intelligence-program.
[10] Erin Griffith, “Google Won’t Renew Controversial Pentagon AI Project,” WIRED (June 1, 2018), https://www.wired.com/story/google-wont-renew-controversial-pentagon-ai-project/.
Juan Proaño is an entrepreneur, technologist, and business leader who is active in civic affairs, social impact, and politics. In his two decades of entrepreneurship, Juan has founded and managed three companies in the tech industry, including Plus Three, a tech-company– serving nonprofit, advocacy, membership, and political organizations. Juan has been recognized for his pioneering work in technology and online fundraising fields. He has been featured in Time Magazine and has been recognized by the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce as one of the top 100 Latino CEOs. Active in civic and community affairs, Juan has been a bridge builder between various underrepresented communities: at the NAACP, he served as the first Latino on the CEO Advisory Committee, led their response to Hurricane Katrina, worked on the Voting Rights Reauthorization Act, and worked on a major campaign against capital punishment.