Still, there are key aspects to immigration enforcement under Trump that are frighteningly new, albeit some time in the making.

In 2000, when George W. Bush was elected, drones, face recognition, mobile fingerprint scanners, and cell-site simulators—which mimic cellphone towers to intercept phone data—were novel or non-existent. Under the Immigration and Naturalization Service and its successor, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, immigration enforcement was a low-tech affair, mostly known for large worksite raids.

Under Barack Obama, ICE went high-tech. At the heart of that shift were biometrics: precise, digitized measurements of immigrants’ bodies. Obama ramped up a Bush-era program, Secure Communities, which sent booking fingerprints from local jails to the Department of Homeland Security, shunting hundreds of thousands of undocumented and legal immigrants, many arrested for minor offenses, into federal deportations.

Previously, federal use of biometrics in the field had focused on Iraq and Afghanistan; with a fingerprint or iris scan, soldiers could tell militants from civilians. In his final years, Obama hit the brakes on Secure Communities—but mobile biometrics trickled down anyways. ICE agents began to stop people in the street to scan their fingerprints. Authorities requested face-recognition searches of Vermont driver’s license photos, looking for visa overstays. Customs and Border Protection sought proposals for face-recognition enhanced drones that, mid-flight, would scan and identify people’s faces.

For all of these technical advances, however, Obama never unleashed his full surveillance powers on immigration enforcement inside the U.S.; most of Obama’s removals took place at the border. Under his Priority Enforcement Program, actions inside the country were primarily targeted against people with criminal records.

Donald Trump brings two fundamental changes. The first is animus. When Trump calls Mexican immigrants drug traffickers and rapists, when he says a judge cannot do his job because of his Mexican heritage, when he implies that Muslim immigrants are party to a vast, Islamist conspiracy (we have to “figure out what’s going on”), it could send a signal to rank and file immigration enforcement.

Second, Trump is starting to use his surveillance arsenal to its utmost legal and technical capacity—within the U.S. Shortly after Carcamo-Carranza’s arrest using a cell-site simulator, a DHS spokesperson clarified that the new “border” drones would not be limited to the border. Instead, the drones would be used wherever there is a “mission need,” a wink at DHS’s claim that the Border Patrol can conduct searches up to 100 miles from the actual border. Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, a prominent immigration attorney in Virginia, reports that since Trump’s inauguration, every one of his clients arrested by ICE has had their fingerprints scanned before being taken into custody.