This submission is on behalf of the Immigrant Defense Project’s (IDP’s) Surveillance Tech and Immigration Policing project and the Center for Constitutional Rights, in response to the Office of High Commissioner’s call for stakeholder input on Resolution 47/23, “New and emerging digital technologies and human rights.” We address the growing ecosystem of public-private surveillance of migrants and immigrants in the United States and the ways that the state and business enterprises consistently violate all three core Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Our submission focuses on the ways that technology companies fuel the U.S. government’s surveillance, invasive biometrics collection, policing, detention, and deportation of migrants. To draw on the risks that the resolution itself highlights, state actors including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and technology companies jointly threaten and violate citizens’ and noncitizens’ “right to equality and nondiscrimination, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association, the right to an effective remedy and the right to privacy.” Particularly in the absence of effective remedy, private companies’ enabling of ongoing violations of international human rights law warrants enhanced scrutiny, regulation, and national and international action.

Read the full submission here (PDF).