When I arrived in the US four years ago to start my doctorate at Cornell University, I thought I’d be the last person to be hunted down by the immigration authorities. As far as I could tell, “the special relationship” meant that a British passport carried a sort of immunity akin to that enjoyed by diplomats; it was a mobility that allowed me to work, after all, as a journalist unscathed across west Africa’s restive Sahel belt for years.

Things began to fall apart after I attended a pro-Palestine protest on campus in September last year. We had brought a job fair to a standstill – because it featured booths from Boeing and L3Harris, companies that supplied Israel with the armaments it needed to carry out its genocidal campaign in Gaza. Although I was there for just five minutes, I was subsequently banned from campus, a punishment that felt like a kind of house arrest because my home was on the university’s Ithaca campus in upstate New York. While I could continue living there, I was barred from entering the university premises.

In January, as Donald Trump steamrolled into office brandishing an arsenal of executive orders targeting non-citizen student protesters, I left my home and went into hiding at the remote home of a professor, fearing the reach of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). Three months later, I self-deported to Canada, then flew to Switzerland. I was prompted to flee after a friend, who had spent time with me in Ithaca, was detained at a Florida airport – on the other side of the country – and questioned about my whereabouts. I did not return to the UK as reports that pro-Palestine journalists had been arrested there made me fearful.

I hoped my arrival in Switzerland would mark the end of my ordeal. But two weeks in, two distressing emails reached my inbox. The first was from Cornell, informing me that the US government had effectively terminated my student visa status. The second came from Google, informing me that it had “received and responded to legal process” and handed my data to the Department of Homeland Security. These emails arrived 90 minutes apart.

The quickfire emails confirmed my hunch that I had been under surveillance and that if I attempted to re-enter the US, I would likely be detained by Ice, like other student protesters. But the secrecy surrounding these procedures and the lack of due process to challenge them raised more questions than they answered.

Was there any correspondence between Cornell and US government agencies prior to my visa being terminated? (I asked the university this, among other questions, and have not heard back.) What did the most powerful government in the world want with my Google data? Why did the US authorities go after me? Had they woven a yarn of suspicion based on my years working as a journalist covering the US-led “war on terror”? Was I targeted because I was Black and Muslim?

I may never get the full answers, but an investigation by Amnesty International sheds new light on the alarming ways that the US government has deployed shadowy AI tech to mass-monitor, surveil and assess non-US citizen students and immigrants.

Amnesty says that Babel X, software made by Virginia-based Babel Street, allegedly scours social media for “terrorism”-related content and tries to predict the likely intent behind the posts. The software uses “persistent search” to constantly monitor new information once an initial query has been made. It is possible that my reportage – on everything from Guantánamo to drone strikes in the Sahel and the role the British secret services played in the Libyan civil war – was flagged. Amnesty International says that probabilistic technologies have a wide margin of error, “can often be discriminatory and biased, and could lead to falsely framing pro-Palestine content as antisemitic”. Babel Street did not respond to Amnesty’s requests for comment for their investigation.

Then there is Palantir’s ImmigrationOS, which creates an electronic case file to centralise all information related to an immigrant investigation, allowing authorities to link multiple investigations to draw connections between cases. Using ImmigrationOS, Ice can also track self-deportations and it was rolled out in April, the same month I left. It may help explain why the US took action to bar my re-entry into the country when it did. (Palantir told Amnesty that it does not specifically target student protesters, nor are their products powering rights-violating immigration enforcements.)

This all exists in the pre-crime space that has expanded exponentially since the launch of the US-led “war on terror” – catch (or kill) now, ask questions later. To this day, I have never been accused or prosecuted for any crime, or for exhibiting antisemitic behaviour. As has been made clear by a recent complaint by the University of Chicago Law Clinic, submitted on behalf of me and eight other non-citizen protesters to eight UN special rapporteurs, I’ve merely exercised my first amendment free speech rights to oppose the slaughter of innocent people. It is the US government that has acted unlawfully and immorally.

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The Amnesty report highlights the ways that big tech and powerful states are colluding in the surveillance, management and expulsion of racial others and migrants, as well as political dissidents and journalists. We’re seeing this play out in Gaza, where Israel’s “algorithmic warfare” has reduced the territory to a wasteland of corpses and rubble, leaving Palestinians with nowhere to go and nothing to eat. The investigation further shows that the US is mobilising tech to strip asylum seekers and migrants of their basic human rights, consigning them to arbitrary detention before they have a chance to defend themselves or ask for safety.

While I am far from regretting my actions, I now live in a month-to-month limbo of precarious living arrangements and nagging doubts about whether I can finish my degree before my funding is cut. I have been forced to jump through hoops to access life-saving medical treatment. I was perhaps naive to think that as a British national with a London accent, at an Ivy League university, I was above these horrors. But just before I left the US, Joe, my African American barber, reminded me that: “You’re just Black.” My Blackness made my status in the US conditional. And because I am also Muslim and write about these identities does not help matters. It is no surprise that in a country with a legacy of racial slavery and post-9/11 Islamophobia, I would get flagged.

With this technology in the hands of an administration that has little regard for constitutional safeguards, we should all beware. What is piloted on minorities soon drifts into the mainstream.

• Amandla Thomas-Johnson is a journalist and writer covering global Blackness and contemporary Islam

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