A White House spokesperson referred POLITICO to ICE for questions about the agency’s operations. ICE did not respond to questions about its protections against potentially excessive surveillance.
Governors in several blue states have already responded by restricting ICE’s access to state-level citizen data. New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Washington recently cut off ICE’s access to their state motor vehicle records. In Congress, a coalition of 40 Democrats asked other governors to follow, saying in a letter that ICE’s access to DMV records allowed for “unjustified, politicized actions” from the Trump administration.
ICE’s use of facial recognition to determine immigration status has particularly troubled Democrats who worry the technology puts Americans at risk of detention and deportation.
The House Homeland Security Committee’s ranking member, Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), criticized it as a “frightening, repugnant, and unconstitutional attack on Americans’ rights and freedoms” in a statement to POLITICO.
Republicans have been more accepting of ICE’s expanded surveillance capabilities, though still within limits.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who has criticized the Biden administration’s surveillance against conservatives, told POLITICO that he supports ICE’s acquisition of surveillance tech “so long as it’s done constitutionally.”
“Acquiring the stuff, that’s no problem,” he said, citing the importance of Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches by the government. “How they use it really matters.”
Buying tech, and broadening the mission
ICE’s technology arsenal has sharply increased in the past year, with the agency investing in high-tech surveillance tools including social media monitoring powered by artificial intelligence, software to obtain phone location data, drones, license plate readers and iris scanners.
One of its largest investments is for “skip-tracing” services, typically used by debt collectors and bounty hunters to track people who are difficult to find, across new identities, homes and occupations.
These capabilities were not used by ICE in past administrations. They were recommended to the Trump White House as part of a sweeping crackdown strategy submitted by private military contractors last December.
In October, ICE awarded two contracts for skip-tracing capabilities totaling $8 million. It vastly expanded its ambitions in November, issuing a request for information for the data-intensive tracking service with a potential $281 million contract attached. In December, ICE awarded contracts to 10 companies for skip tracing services, with the potential to earn over $1 billion by the end of their contracts in 2027, The Intercept reported.
A spokesperson for ICE said the November request wasn’t a formal spending plan, but was intended as “market research” to see how many vendors could fulfill an order of this size.
In September ICE paid $3.8 million for facial recognition tools from the company Clearview AI, which operates a database of 30 billion images scraped from online sources.
ICE also plans to expand its use of social media surveillance, WIRED reported in October, scouring billions of online posts to find leads for immigration enforcement operations.
As the agency upgrades its tools, it has also sent signals it wants to expand its mission from finding immigrants to tracing critics and stopping threats to its agents.
The contract for Clearview AI, for instance, said the technology would be used for investigations on assaults against law enforcement officers.
In August, the agency signaled it wants to use social media surveillance to track threats against ICE personnel by members of the public, according to a Privacy Impact Assessment published by DHS.