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The Lawfare Podcast

The Lawfare Podcast

Lawfare Daily: The Dangers of Privatized, Automated Immigration Enforcement

Apr 30, 2026 · 43m

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About this episode

Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Chinmayi Sharma , an associate professor at Fordham Law School and a contributing editor at Lawfare , to discuss Sharma’s forthcoming law review article, “Immigration Enforcement Intermediaries.” They discuss the U.S. federal government’s increasingly privatized and automated system of immigration enforcement—which Sharma describes as “a code-based Leviathan—cloaked in the veneer of legal legitimacy yet operating outside traditional democratic channels”—and how private technology vendors entrench their positions within that system. Sharma also walks through a number of proposals for states and other sub-federal entities to counteract…