The Trump administration’s war on immigrants, public trust, and tech-assisted contact tracing
By Kade Crockford, Director of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts
This essay is part of a collection written by members of the Berkman Klein Center’s Working Group on Digital Pandemic Response. The group, made up of experts from academia, civil society, the public sector, and industry, takes on difficult questions around the use of digital tools and data to help attenuate the COVID-19 pandemic. Each essay is the perspective of the author, not of the Berkman Klein Center.
There’s a lot of debate about whether or not technology assisted contact tracing (TACT) or exposure notification technology could or would meaningfully contribute to pandemic response in the United States. But one thing is not up for debate: trust in the public health system is a necessary foundation for effective pandemic management. Unfortunately, centuries of largely unaddressed racism and xenophobia, and the racist rhetoric and policies emanating from the Trump administration, have compromised that foundation. For too many communities, particularly lower-income Black and brown immigrant communities, trust in the authorities is non-existent. These are also the very same communities that are seeing the highest rates of COVID-19 infection. Racism, xenophobia, and the COVID-19 pandemic combine to create a toxic brew, endangering not only those hardest-hit communities, but all people, and the government’s pandemic response.
To say that this lack of trust complicates plans for using TACT or exposure notification systems is putting it mildly. Immigrant rights advocates and public health practitioners who work in immigrant communities in and around Boston have told the ACLU of Massachusetts that immigrant families have largely declined to participate in the state’s manual contract tracing effort, spearheaded by the non-profit Partners in Health. As one health worker told me, if community members are reluctant to talk to contact tracers, there is no chance they will download a contact tracing or exposure notification app on their phone.
Evidence of this absence of trust appears in other areas as well, impeding pandemic response efforts. As the New York Times reports, officials in the largely immigrant city of Chelsea, Massachusetts expected residents to jump at the government’s offer of safe quarantine housing at a hotel in nearby Revere. But while the government made 157 beds available to people in need of a safe place to quarantine apart from family and roommates, ten days after the rooms were offered, only 14 people had taken up the opportunity. The Times:
“We were expecting the floodgates to open,” said Alexander Train, the assistant director of the city’s Department of Planning and Development. He said undocumented immigrants may be afraid to take advantage of the offer, fearing it would lead to deportation.
“I think there is some uncertainty and anxiety that is inhibiting the flow of guests to the hotel, because it is attributed to the government,” he said. “It’s about, ‘what if I don’t make it back to my family?’”
Public health officials in Massachusetts understand this is a problem and have tried to gain the trust of immigrant communities. The state’s COVID-19 webpage on contact tracing states, “Your information is strictly confidential and will be treated as the private medical record it is. Your information will not be shared with other agencies, including immigration officials.” But those assurances clearly aren’t enough to secure the trust and participation of the state’s immigrant communities.
Trust in technology enhanced contact tracing systems is lacking among the general public, as well. An Axios-Ipsos poll conducted in May found that a large majority of the population — 66 percent of the 1,000 people polled — would not or likely would not adopt such a technology. These concerns and others prompted Democratic lawmakers to propose federal legislation to protect the confidentiality of contact tracing information. The Public Health Emergency Privacy Act would, according to its sponsors, “prevent the potential misuse of health data by government agencies with no role in public health.”
Efforts to create legal protections barring police and immigration officials from accessing health data are laudable and ought to be supported. But the Trump administration has demonstrated over and over again that it cannot be trusted, no matter what the law says. Trump’s attempts to use Census data in its war against immigrants and its decision to exclude immigrants from obtaining lawful status if they accept public benefits through the so-called “public charge” rule undermine these law reform efforts aimed at building trust among the most vulnerable. Immigrants have no reason to trust this administration, which has demonstrated time and again that it will stop at nothing to harm them and their families.
Tragically, while state and local public health officials are not responsible for the President’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy, their efforts will nonetheless be stymied by him. If we learn anything from this pandemic, let’s hope it is that our humanity is inextricably tied up in one another’s fates. No contact tracing app or terms of service — no matter how well designed or lawyered — will be able to undo the harm this administration has caused to immigrants and to all of us. And for that reason, among others, these approaches will not likely work.
