U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has begun the ambitious task of repatriating an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in targeted operations nationwide. White House Border Czar Tom Homan has coordinated multiple agencies to round up and apprehend those with criminal records, including: thousands of arrests; several deportation flights on military planes; and some of the roughly 1.5 million immigrants from 208 countries currently awaiting removal across the US could be on their way to Guantanamo Bay. The White House promises 25-50 percent tariffs on any foe or ally refusing to accept repatriates from the US, and Homan proffers the week's postmort: “If you're in the country illegally, you got a problem.”

Unless you’re DeepSeek, now the No. 1 downloaded free app on Apple’s iPhone store. Dethroning the dominant leader ChatGPT, the Chinese startup was developed at a fraction of the cost of its competitors; spooked the stock markets with a sharp sell off; works around US sanctions on Nvidia chips; could undermine the Stargate AI Infrastructure Initiative; and may possibly surpass the US led AI revolution.

The question for Beijing and Washington isn't who'll prevail, but if or whether DeepSeek's quant / hedge fund manager Liang Wenfeng has somehow discovered the holy grail? The existential threat of AI is simply that it could surpass human oversight, but as world leaders gathered at the 80th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz this week their came a quote. “Never Again,” was often invoked, whilst major AI and chip companies were plummeting by the billions and being revoked.

Introducing their uniquely open source, “The Chinese upstart proves that export controls are increasingly futile or counterproductive in foreign policy,” says Gregory Allen, director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Their key components are free for anyone to access and modify, and effectively welcome the world to collaborate."

A United States executive order is calling for all children — born to those on legal temporary status, or in the U.S. unlawfully — to be exported. The order has been targeted by numerous lawsuits and will likely reach the Supreme Court. While birthright citizenship is enshrined in the 14th Amendment, it could be amended with a two-thirds majority. However, The Senate Committee on Homeland Security, and the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security and Enforcement, oversee immigration in the United States Congress. New legislation is being cobbled together in both clearing a path for mass deportations.

It was President John F. Kennedy who first directed all government contractors be hired and treated without regard to race, creed, color or national origin. Sixty years on, President Trump has rescinded Kennedy’s manifesto on affirmative action by replacing it with one his own: Ending Illegal Discrimination And Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity. Two men, managers of the U.S. federal government, on two very different sides of history.

A litany of executive order now prohibits affirmative action by government contractors; revokes aspects of the Equal Employment Opportunity in federal contracting (EEO); instructs federal departments not to issue contracts to private organizations that enforce diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI); and whilst putting all DEI staff on leave has invited 2 million federal employees to resign and join the private sector. Trump explains:

“Roughly 60 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, critical and influential institutions of American society have adopted and actively use race and sex-based preferences called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) that can violate the civil-rights laws of this Nation.” The EO continues:

DEI policies violate the text and spirit of our longstanding Federal civil-rights laws in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system.

While DEI, EEO and affirmative action all share a dotted line to discrimination, they’re radically different. Kennedy’s EO on 6 March 1961 required government contractors to "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees be treated without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) was subsequently codified into law by his successor Lyndon B. Johnson in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibiting employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) equate to a menagerie of policies that began emerging in the standards and practices of various sectors of society.

Amazon, Meta, McDonalds are divesting from their DEI programs whilst Costco and Apple are defending them. But can corporate initiatives or executive orders compete with AI?

As it happens, AI can actually exacerbate discrimination by perpetuating existing biases present in the data that it’s trained on. What’s attracted the most admiration about DeepSeek is what Nvidia calls a “perfect example of test time scaling.” DeepSeek’s R1 model demonstrates its train of thought, and applies that knowledge to further training without having to be fed new prompts or sources of data by humans.

The Artificial Intelligence Civil Rights Act — landmark legislation that prohibits the use, sale, or promotion of AI systems that discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion or disability — is a predilection to sync algorithmic decision-making tools with human prompts de jour of the day. As the nation’s own history with discrimination demonstrates, In-group favoritism exacerbates Out-group prejudice and has done magnificent harm in seemingly harmless ways.

“Never Again” — the slogan most associated with the lessons of the Holocaust — was lifted from a 1927 epic poem about the siege of Masada. As legend has it, a group of Jewish rebels (the Sicarii), evade the Roman army by committing a mass suicide to avoid capture. Thus reminding us that prejudice can’t prevail against what DeepSeek calls “an open source code freely available for anyone to view and modify without a central authority.”