Off-Broadway play 'Data' is scarily prescient about AI and immigration

The poster for the play Data warns, "The data is out there. The danger is real." Written by Matthew Libby and directed by Tyne Rafaeli, the production at New York's Lucille Lortel Theatre explores data privacy, AI acceleration and immigration. The story follows Maneesh (Karan Brar), a programmer at Silicon Valley firm Athena Technologies, who discovers the company's top-secret bid to work with the Department of Homeland Security on an AI-powered immigrant surveillance project.

The play’s premise has felt alarmingly close to real events. In 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement enlisted Palantir to build an AI- and data-mining platform to track immigrants, and in 2026 Palantir developed ELITE, an app using Department of Health and Human Services data to identify neighborhoods for raids.

Those developments have reshaped how audiences respond: the Arena Stage run in Washington, D.C., which began Oct.

United States, New York

off-broadway, data play, matthew libby, tyne rafaeli, lucille lortel, karan brar, athena technologies, immigrant surveillance, data privacy, palantir