US Government and Citizens Abroad

On one side of the world, federal agents point smartphones at people's faces on American streets, running them through databases of billions of images in seconds. On the other, American citizens huddle in hotel lobbies in Dubai and Doha, refreshing State Department websites that offer little more than a phone number and a suggestion to "shelter in place."

These two realities — a government that has built a surveillance infrastructure of staggering scope, and one that cannot reliably evacuate its own citizens from a war zone it helped create — are not unrelated. They reflect a dramatic reordering of federal priorities: the machinery of the state turned inward with extraordinary precision, even as its outward-facing obligations to citizens abroad fray to the breaking point.

The Surveillance Machine

The Department of Homeland Security has constructed what civil liberties organizations describe as the most expansive domestic surveillance apparatus in American history. At its center is Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which over the past year has gone on what the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls a "surveillance shopping spree" [1].

The tools are varied and powerful. ICE agents now carry smartphones loaded with Mobile Fortify, a facial recognition app that can compare a person's face against massive government databases — including passport records, driver's licenses, and at least one additional category the government has redacted from public documents [2]. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has signed contracts with Clearview AI, a company that has scraped billions of images from the internet to build a facial recognition database of unprecedented scale [3]. Together, these tools allow agents to potentially identify anyone they encounter on a public street.

But facial recognition is only one layer. ICE renewed an $11 million contract with Cellebrite, a phone-cracking firm that can extract complete data images from locked devices — including encrypted messages from Signal and WhatsApp, location histories, and photographs. A parallel $3 million contract with Magnet Forensics provides the Graykey device, a competitor product for unlocking phones [1]. ICE has also resumed a $2 million contract with Paragon, maker of the Graphite spyware that made headlines in 2025 when it was found on the phones of Italian civil society members [1].

For tracking people at scale, ICE purchased a subscription to Webloc, a location-data platform made by PenLink that allows agents to "geofence" a specific area and monitor every phone within it [4]. And the crown jewel of the system — Palantir's ImmigrationOS, a $30 million AI platform — is designed to sift through immigration records, criminal histories, Social Security files, IRS tax data, and license-plate reader data to identify people for deportation [5]. A related Palantir tool called ELITE pulls data from Medicaid records, DMV files, utility bills, and court records to generate dossiers with "confidence scores" on individuals, overlaid on a map so agents can select "target-rich areas" for raids [6].

The total investment is staggering. The Trump White House requested $178 billion for DHS in FY2026 — nearly doubling recent annual funding levels — with unprecedented amounts earmarked for border security and immigration enforcement [7].

When Surveillance Sweeps Up Citizens

The machinery built to track undocumented immigrants has not stayed confined to that purpose. ICE leaders, backed by top administration officials, have asserted the authority to use these tools to monitor anti-ICE protesters, including U.S. citizens [8].

In Minnesota, federal agents have followed protesters to their homes, deployed chemical irritants and rubber bullets against demonstrators, and arrested people simply for observing operations from a public sidewalk. The ACLU filed suit, with more than 30 people providing sworn statements describing encounters with immigration agents [9]. A federal judge ordered agents to stop arresting, retaliating against, and pepper-spraying people engaged in "peaceful and unobstructive protest activity" [9]. Similar litigation is underway in Maine and Oregon.

NBC News documented ICE agents using Mobile Fortify to scan the faces of bystanders and protesters during immigration operations — not because they were suspected of any immigration violation, but apparently to identify and catalogue critics of the agency [2]. Despite this, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told Congress last month that there is no database of protesters [8].

The facial recognition technology itself has proven dangerously unreliable. In one documented case, Mobile Fortify was used on a woman twice during the same interaction and returned two entirely different names [10]. ProPublica has reported that more than 170 U.S. citizens were detained by immigration officers during the first nine months of the administration's second term, with facial recognition likely playing a role in some wrongful detentions [10]. Error rates are known to be significantly higher for people of color and women [10].

On March 3, 2026, more than 70 Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to the DHS Office of Inspector General demanding an investigation into the warrantless purchase and use of Americans' location data. Led by Senator Ron Wyden, the letter noted that ICE had resumed purchasing cell phone location data despite having ended a similar program in 2023 after public backlash [4]. Separately, congressional Democrats demanded DHS rescind a memo — provided by agency whistleblowers — that purportedly authorized agents to enter homes without judicial warrants [11].

Abandoned Abroad

While the surveillance state expands at home, Americans overseas are discovering that the government's capacity — or willingness — to help them is shrinking.

The crisis reached its sharpest point on February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel launched joint military operations against Iran. Within days, airspace across the Middle East was closed, commercial flights were cancelled, and tens of thousands of travelers — including American citizens — were stranded [12].

Karen and Bob Carifee, a Texas couple, were in Dubai when their cruise was cancelled amid retaliatory strikes. They described being unable to reach anyone at the U.S. consulate and said they received no guidance on how to leave [13]. Their experience was far from unique. Thousands of cruise ship passengers were stranded at ports in Doha and across the Gulf, and the State Department did not issue departure orders for 14 Middle Eastern countries until three days into the conflict [14].

Senator Andy Kim called the delayed warnings "a clear sign of ZERO strategy and planning," adding that "Americans have limited options to evacuate at an extremely dangerous moment with no government assistance" [12]. By the time Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced charter flights from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan on March 3, more than 9,000 Americans had already left the region on their own, while at least 1,500 more were still waiting for help [15]. Even the charter flights proved unreliable — Rubio acknowledged instances where planes had to turn around mid-flight because airspace was closed again [15].

A Hollowed-Out Diplomatic Corps

The evacuation failures did not occur in a vacuum. They are the predictable consequence of a systematic reduction in the State Department's capacity to serve Americans overseas.

Under the current administration, the State Department faces proposed budget cuts of up to 50 percent. Plans call for the closure of 10 embassies and 17 consulates worldwide, including posts in Luxembourg, South Sudan, and Malta, as well as consular offices across France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Brazil [16]. Chiefs of mission abroad have been instructed to pare staffing to "the bare minimum required" [16].

These cuts have real consequences for the roughly 9 million American citizens living abroad and millions more who travel internationally each year. When a crisis strikes — whether a war, a natural disaster, or a cancelled cruise in a suddenly dangerous region — the first point of contact is a consular officer. With fewer officers, fewer posts, and reduced budgets, the infrastructure for helping Americans in trouble is being dismantled precisely as the world grows more volatile.

The State Department pushed back on criticism by noting that over 9,000 Americans successfully departed the Middle East and that it was covering charter flight costs [17]. But critics point out that planning for civilian evacuations should have preceded military operations that the administration knew would destabilize the region.

The Contradiction at the Heart of Policy

What emerges from these parallel developments is a stark imbalance. The federal government is investing record sums in the technology and manpower to monitor people within its borders — including its own citizens exercising their First Amendment rights — while reducing its ability to protect those same citizens when they are most vulnerable abroad.

The numbers tell the story. DHS's requested $178 billion budget dwarfs the State Department's diminished allocation. ICE can deploy Clearview AI's database of billions of faces, Palantir's AI targeting systems, Paragon's phone-hacking spyware, and geofencing tools that track every device in a given area. Yet the same government could not get planes to stranded Americans because no one had coordinated with military planners to keep airspace open for evacuation flights.

Legislative pushback is mounting on both fronts. The ICE Out of My Face Act, introduced in February by Senators Markey, Merkley, and Wyden alongside Representative Jayapal, would ban ICE and CBP from using facial recognition and require deletion of biometric data already collected [18]. On the evacuation side, lawmakers from both parties have called for formal investigations into the administration's failure to plan for civilian departures before launching military strikes [12].

What Comes Next

The legal battles over ICE surveillance are likely to intensify. The ACLU's Minnesota lawsuit is proceeding through discovery, and additional cases in Maine and Oregon could establish broader precedent on the limits of immigration enforcement surveillance directed at citizens [9]. The EFF's Freedom of Information litigation is seeking documents on ICE's tracking apps and the scope of data collection [1]. And the congressional demand for an Inspector General investigation into warrantless data purchases could force greater transparency about which tools are being used, on whom, and under what legal authority [4].

For Americans abroad, the immediate question is whether the State Department can mount an adequate response to a crisis it helped precipitate. The longer-term question is whether a government that has chosen to invest so heavily in watching its own people will retain the capacity — or the interest — in helping them when they need it most.

As one stranded American told CNN from a hotel in the Gulf: "We pay our taxes. We follow the rules. And when we needed our country, no one picked up the phone" [14].