Part 2.

A small aside: Houston Mayor John Whitmire, a Democrat, has a history of accepting donations from private prison PACs—about $30k in total. The last was in 2018, but he remains another data point suggesting that we cannot trust anyone who takes money from that industry.

Part 1.

They're not sending their best.

The IRS is authorized to disclose some confidential information to individuals “personally and directly engaged in” non-tax criminal investigations or proceedings.

Apparently, a single ICE employee claimed to be personally engaged in >1M such investigations.

I sometimes wonder what our lives would be like if Fred had just hugged him a couple of times.

🎯 From 1895-2022, the U.S. issued about 8.4 million deportation orders — far fewer than the number of people the administration hopes to see gone in just four years. There's just no way for them to reach their goal without getting "voluntary" departures way up; coercion is central to their plan.

Oh, and that 85% accuracy requirement? ICE is flexible on that. If I'm reading this correctly (and I hope I'm not), they're willing to accept App Store ratings in lieu of rigorous translation accuracy testing. 🤯

There's really no question that AI translation services are not an adequate substitute for professional interpreters, but it's clear that ICE's only concern is, of course, pushing people through the system as fast as possible.

Download the docs: sam.gov/workspace/co...

5/5

They also want to be able to include "pre-populated DHS/ICE phraseology," so that officers can, one assumes, push a button rather than speaking into their phone.

It may not be the most harmful aspect of their plan, but it will certainly reduce interaction and further dehumanize immigrants.

4/5

Among the 25 languages that ICE wants the AI translation app to support, several are considered 'low-resource.' For these languages, there is insufficient digital data available for neural language models to train on to achieve an acceptable level of accuracy.

3/5

While ICE says the app will be a supplement to professional language lines and intended for use in "informal, noncritical communication," the use cases it mentions include potentially high-stakes situations where safety and due process may be on the line.

2/5