The article alludes to it at the end:
> In late February, the administration said it would create a national registry for undocumented migrants and those failing to sign up could possibly face criminal prosecution.
This is significant because most undocumented immigrants arrived normally and then overstayed a visa, which is not a felony nor misdemeanor, but an even lower category of "civil infraction"--like a parking ticket.
Does this foreshadow a massive Federal government data hoovering? Which, sigh, I'm sure DOGE will feed into an LLM.
Correct, the immigration laws (and databases) involved are all federal. However there are are shared legal conventions, such as the spectrum of trivial-to-major and how things are named. (Kind of like how logging levels are often INFO, WARN, ERROR, etc. across many pieces of software.)
Here I'm discussing the trivial end of the (shared) spectrum, but I'm using a non-federal example because it's something more people will recognize and relate-to. The majority of laws an individual American encounters are state-level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classes_of_offenses_under_Unit...
> Does this foreshadow a massive Federal government data hoovering?
The federal government can't compel states to "do their work for them", so getting special access to non-public state databases will probably depend on whether the state leadership decides to help make it happen.
Two contrasting examples:
* https://www.courthousenews.com/washington-sues-county-for-he...
* https://minnesotareformer.com/2025/03/10/despite-profiling-c...
