ICE windfall from Trump megabill fuels surveillance juggernaut
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Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is on a surveillance spending spree:
- The agency is using much of its windfall from this summer's One Big Beautiful Bill Act to fund a major expansion of biometric identification, cellphone tracking and other electronic capabilities.
Why it matters: The megabill's $75 billion cash infusion for ICE was sold by Congress as a way to speed up hiring new agents and adding detention space. But ICE is also going big on surveillance.
The new surveillance spending includes:
- A contract with Clearview AI, which provides a facial recognition algorithm.
- A multimillion-dollar contract with BI² for its biometric data system IRIS, which promises a real-time identification of a person after taking a photo of their eye, according to the company website.
- A restarted contract with Paragon Solutions, which provides software that can remotely access smartphone data, as the Washington Post reported. The Biden administration had banned Paragon as an unethical spyware company.
- Buying access to a real-time smartphone location tracking system from the digital intelligence company Penlink, as 404 Media reported. Penlink platforms are used for "integrating location data from multiple sources, building event timelines for case development and correlation with external events," according to a partially redacted government contract description.
The other side: Cooper Quintin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties nonprofit, said the new spending raises the possibility of "targeted surveillance, not just of undocumented people, but of American citizens as well."
- Quintin said ICE could say: "Who owns all of the phones that have been outside of the ICE facility every night for the last three nights? And let's send them all to HSI for investigation." HSI (Homeland Security Investigations) is the investigative arm of ICE.
What we're watching: Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, said it's been difficult to follow the purposes of these new contracts because the agency hasn't been responsive.
- "I don't have facts right now, and I like to operate based on facts," Peters said. "The fact that I don't have facts makes me very uncomfortable."
Zoom in: ICE has added about 7,000 beds across private and state-run facilities since the "BBB" became law this summer, according to press releases on new additions.
- ICE's goal is roughly 50,000 new beds, to bring the total capacity to 100,000.
- ICE declined to share how many recruits have trained and gotten on board since the bill passed. Its goal is 10,000 more agents.
- The agency has decreased the training time and Spanish-language training for new agents, and lifted an age cap. It's also running a multimillion-dollar recruitment ad campaign.
- ICE didn't respond to requests for comment.
The backstory: ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, have a long history of using the private sector to expand surveillance capabilities.
- In 2022, the ACLU published thousands of pages outlining a partnership between ICE and Customs and Border Protection with Venntel and Babel Street, which provided real-time cell phone location data.
- An Inspector General's report said the use of this location data violated the agency's own privacy laws. Advocates also warned about possible Fourth Amendment violations.
