Immigration and Customs Enforcement is rapidly expanding its surveillance capabilities under President Donald Trump. Since the passage of the president’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July, which is projected to provide an estimated $75 billion in new funding to the agency over the next four years, ICE has begun acquiring a wide range of surveillance tools.
On Tuesday, documents obtained by 404 Media revealed the agency’s latest publicly known acquisition: a tool that grants ICE access to billions of location signals each day from hundreds of millions of cell phones and other devices.
The location data, provided to ICE by the company Penlink, allows the agency to track individuals without a warrant. Many common smartphone apps that have been given location access commonly sell that information to data brokers, who in turn sell it to governments.
Previously, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, was barred from purchasing location data under former President Joe Biden after it was found to have broken the law. The purchase of Penlink’s tool by ICE signals a reversal in that policy under Trump.
Beryl Lipton, senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the government has obtained tools that permit “indiscriminate and warrantless data collection” that “can absolutely assist ICE in turning law-abiding citizens and protestors into targets of the federal government.”
Hacking into cell phones, social media
ICE is also investing in cracking phones. In September, the agency entered into a $2 million contract with Paragon, a company that produces software known as Graphite for remotely hacking phones. Later that month, ICE also began an $11 million contract with the company Cellebrite, which develops tools for cracking into locked phones in the agency’s possession.
To monitor social media, ICE has spent more than $5 million to date on tools from the surveillance firm Cobwebs. One tool, known as Tangles, uses artificial intelligence to scour “the open internet and the dark web for information relevant to police investigations,” according to Forbes.
“Tangles creates a sort-of daily life profile of the people it surveils by mining social media for their posts, contacts, locations and events they attended, combining it with any information leaked about them online,” Forbes reported. “It can also search a subject’s face across other data the tool has collected to see where else they’ve been spotted.”
Another tool from Cobwebs, known as WebLoc, can “monitor trends of mobile devices” in specific locations to determine how often certain individuals are present.
Tapping into existing systems
In addition, ICE has tapped into existing surveillance systems. It was revealed in May that the agency was accessing license plate data collected by police departments across the country. Local law enforcement performed searches for ICE using an AI-powered license plate scanning tool, produced by the company Flock, despite the agency having no formal contract of its own for the service.
Also in May, contract records obtained by Forbes showed that ICE had purchased nearly $1 million worth of cell-site simulators, a cellphone tracking tool commonly referred to as an IMSI-catcher or Stingray. The deal was originally approved under the Biden administration.
Less than two months after ICE’s purchase, Straight Arrow News detected the presence of an IMSI-catcher at a protest outside an ICE facility in Washington state.
In June, internal ICE emails leaked to 404 Media revealed that the agency’s officers were using a smartphone app known as Mobile Fortify, which is capable of identifying individuals based on their fingerprints or face. The tool’s facial recognition feature matches faces to photos taken by Customs and Border Protection when individuals enter or exit the U.S.
Documents in August also showed that ICE has purchased mobile AI-powered technology for scanning and identifying individuals based on their retinas.
Combined with the vast amounts of other information to which the agency has been granted access, such as sensitive medical data on tens of millions of Americans, ICE’s surveillance capabilities are far greater than they’ve ever been.
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