ICE Digital Arms Buildup Equipping Agency for Mass Surveillance Operations
Posted on October 28, 2025
A new piece from Reason warns that ICE is rapidly acquiring the tools to conduct mass surveillance operations. While these capabilities are being amassed in the name of enforcing immigration law and detaining violent agitators coincident to anti-ICE demonstrations, the technology’s remit can easily be expanded to the peaceful participants in those very demonstrations.
As a Washington Post article cited in the writeup points out, ICE expenditures on surveillance equipment this year is nearing record levels. Last month, the agency ratified $1.4 billion in contracts, an 18-year high for an agency only 23 years old. Here are the more notable among them.
- A $4.6 million contract for an iris recognition system from BI2 Technologies. As CCDBR has noted in the past, one element that makes spying by the federal government so formidable is its capacity to cross-link the databases of its various agencies. The FBI alone has hundreds of millions of driver’s license photos, and has a history of pursuing intelligence sharing arrangements with other agencies, notably the NSA. But if there was any question as to the extent of interagency collaboration, Trump’s order to mandate the pooling of Americans’ data—and the millions of dollars his administration has already spent to engage Palantir to operationalize it—have eliminated any lingering doubt. So, from technical and policy considerations, it is quite possible that this latest purchase could enable the identification a wide swath of the American population.
- A $3.75 million contract with Clearview AI, a now-infamous name in surveillance tech. The company’s calling card is facial recognition technology that made even Facebook blush.
- A $2 million contract to purchase social media tracking tools from Penlink. Among these purchases, the “Weblocs” application is not only able to build dossiers on targets using publicly available social media data, but also to track phone location data obtained from private sector data miners.
But ICE is doing more to beef up its spying powers than going on a shopping spree. The DHS law enforcement arm is minting partnerships with private sector players to secure the right to tap into data that can be leveraged to track anyone on US soil. For instance, ICE recently shook hands with Flock Safety, which operates 80,000 license plate readers nationwide.
All the indiscriminate monitoring technologies that ICE now possesses share the dangers noted in CCDBR’s analysis of stingray devices, which is that they sweep up everyone incidental to the target of law enforcement. It cannot be denied that there are documented cases of small rioting elements coincident to law-abiding demonstrations. However, should the various tools ICE has acquired be applied in the service of riot suppression—or merely under the pretext of such—they will scoop up law-abiding protesters and bystanders as well.
Indeed, the Trump administration has assured Americans that the targets of ICE’s surveillance architecture are undocumented immigrants and “domestic terrorists”. But this edifice is a mere turnkey away from targeting anyone and everyone who dares speak out against the administration, or express any other disfavored speech. One portent of such a trend is the Trump DOJ successfully strong-arming Apple into removing a crowdsourcing application for avoiding ICE presence. The application allows users to indicate areas where they’ve observed ICE agents. While the DOJ characterizes it as a threat to agents’ safety, the app’s developer likened it to flagging speed traps, which even Google Maps allows its users to do.
Taken together, the Homeland Security apparatus now possesses even more means to activate a Panopticon with immigration enforcement and keeping the peace as a pretext. In the absence of regulatory laws passed to constrain the use of mass surveillance tools, there is little stopping precisely this.
You can read the full piece from Reason here.
