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The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will implement an artificial intelligence (AI) system that will allow tracking and analyzing the activities of millions of users on social media, with the aim of identifying immigrants through their posts, images, and digital locations.
According to Univisión, the federal agency will invest $5.7 million in a program developed by the company Signal Labs, which specializes in real-time monitoring of online content.
The system will be able to detect trends, emotions, keywords, and visible personal characteristics in photos or videos.
According to the report, the program could identify users based on physical traits, places visited, or detectable behaviors on platforms like Facebook, X, Instagram, or TikTok, generating automatic alerts for ICE.
The software can also estimate locations and associate profiles through activity patterns.
The immigration lawyer Gabriel Campos, interviewed by Univisión, warned that the use of such tools could facilitate the location and capture of immigrants, including those without criminal records or prior entries in government systems.
"It will be easier to find, using this program, those who already have a file with Immigration, especially those with a criminal record," he explained.
However, Campos warned that the system could also open the door to violations of human rights, privacy, and freedom of expression, as artificial intelligence can process information from any user without a specific court order.
"There is a limit to what the Government can investigate, especially if individuals are not the subject of a formal investigation," the lawyer noted.
For his part, technology specialist David Rodríguez, founder of IA University, explained that the algorithms from Signal Labs can be trained to recognize specific groups or particular traits.
"These models allow for the definition of parameters: men, women, or individuals with certain characteristics. They can be configured to filter almost any visual or textual pattern," he explained.
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