Immigration and Customs Enforcement has gone into overdrive, relying on a vast technology infrastructure to locate and monitor people at scale — from GPS ankle bracelets to phone hacking devices.\r\n\r\nAnd while Americans remain largely invisible online for now, the same hurricane-force shift is about to hit in ways that are far worse: Parents will likely face precrime algorithms that pander to their grandest hopes for their kids; students will experience increasingly insidious forms of standardized testing; our mail is about to be scrutinized in new ways by Amazon’s Ring doorbells; the pleasure we feel as Big Tech firms elbow into physical space via food trucks may soon give way as they battle one another with every weapon imaginable.
From facial recognition and driver’s license databases to powerful case-management and bullet analysis systems, the agency has long outfitted its agents with some of the world’s most sophisticated technology to hunt criminals, smugglers and terrorists.But there is little indication that the agency closely weighs privacy implications — an issue that has come into focus since at least 2011, when agents gained access to phone location data through a practice that a top senator now says was illegal. CNN has reported on about 350,000 deportations between federal entities in a short period of time, highlighting how much tech-enabled enforcement can be when systems are closely linked.
Facial recognition on a national scale
Clearview AI is the most contentious face search engine used by law enforcement. Procurement records also reveal that ICE has purchased Clearview licenses and software, which provides agents with the ability to match faces to billions of images scraped from public websites. Homeland Security Investigations, an ICE unit, uses Clearview to search for suspects and victims in child sexual abuse cases as well as over allegations of human trafficking, according to 404 Media’s reporting, with contracts worth millions.
This ability fits a larger trend. Since at least the decadelong drift by law enforcement toward using facial recognition as just another tool of surveillance, investigative work by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology detailed how federal agencies have already inquired into DMV photo databases — and other such troves of mug shots — allowing immigration authorities to match identities across separate systems with barely any friction. Civil liberties advocates caution the risks of inaccuracy and bias are compounded when results are fed directly into field operations.
Palantir’s spine: ICM and ImmigrationOS
Palantir supplies ICE with Investigative Case Management (ICM), the data backbone that knits together information from immigration, criminal, financial and travel systems. Reporting by 404 Media reveals an ICM interface that allows agents to filter people by immigration status, physical descriptions, travel patterns, presumed relations and more — “tables upon tables” of interconnectable data points that can be turned into high detail lists in moments.
Palantir is also developing an app, called ImmigrationOS — first exposed by Business Insider and detailed by Wired – to expedite the selection and apprehension process. Documents detail dashboards for prioritizing targets, near-real-time visibility into departures and tools to track visa overstays. It’s classic data ops: centralize, score and dispatch.
Data brokers and the power of mass query
ICE’s commercial data broker relationships transform open-source breadcrumbs into useable dossiers. Public records indicate that the agency has a significant subscription to LexisNexis for its law enforcement products, which include Accurint tools. Documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by immigrant rights groups showed more than 1.2 million searches over a seven-month period, frequently to confirm identities, trace family connections and check addresses.
These tools have been shown to be employed in order to flag “suspicious activity” long before a conventional crime is even alleged — a practice that critics contend serves to normalize dragnet surveillance. LexisNexis has said that it is a strong supporter of the legal and ethical use to advance public safety, and that it partners with thousands of agencies across the country.
Spyware and mobile phone extraction
ICE’s surveillance toolbox also includes offensive and forensic tools. Documents reviewed reveal a contract with Paragon Solutions, an Israeli spyware vendor promoted as “ethical” by its investors. The deal, examined under federal prohibitions on commercial spyware, includes licenses, equipment and training. Paragon has run into unrelated controversy outside the country, most prominently in Italy where it had a public falling out with Italian intelligence over a media surveillance scandal.
In the field, ICE and HSI have mobile forensic tools—typically provided by vendors such as Cellebrite and Grayshift—that can unlock phones and extract data from them. These kits are routine purchases at DHS components, according to documents and public procurement logs, allowing for messages, app data and location histories that combine to populate ICM.
License plate data and location tracking
Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) are still a quiet workhorse. Vigilant Solutions camera services are used by ICE, which has also purchased access to commercial ALPR databases and queried billions of scans. Agents can create “hot lists,” receive notifications when a plate pings the camera’s location and map travel patterns — important information when planning an arrest or trying to find where a target is known to frequent.
Commercial mobility data is a second layer on that. Investigations by The Wall Street Journal, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation showed that DHS components bought app-derived location feeds from brokers like Venntel and tools like Babel Street’s Locate X: Though not specialized in immigration, these feeds can show where people assemble in groups or identify safe houses or answer whether someone frequents a work site.
Biometrics and the growing DHS identity cloud
Behind the scenes, DHS is modernizing its core biometric system. The Office of Biometric Identity Management is being moved to the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology program, and its capabilities are now expanding from fingerprints to include face, iris, scars, tattoos and voiceprints with far higher capacity and richer metadata. The databases have been linked across agencies, and government watchdogs like the Government Accountability Office and the DHS Inspector General have raised governance, accuracy and privacy-related concerns.
That means for ICE, richer biometrics provide a faster pathway to resolving identity upon arrest, to matching records against past encounters and generating more automated alerts when an individual interacts with other parts of the federal system.
Oversight, friction and what happens next
The enforcement machine is fueled by contracts, data-sharing agreements and privacy assessments that few outside organizations review — at least until advocacy groups extract copies using freedom of information requests. Federal guidance has since stymied some types of spyware uses, and state laws have tightened rules on retaining facial recognition or license plate reader records. Yet much of ICE’s stack lives in legal gray zones, where commercial data can be purchased without a warrant and analytic tools can indicate inferences that seem like predictions.
The throughline is transparent: today’s deportation campaigns are just as much about data engineering as they are about patrols. The agencies that piece together the most comprehensive picture — combining biometric data with commercially available information and investigative platforms, for example — can move more swiftly. Whether lawmakers and courts will redraw the image that emerges from those boundaries is ultimately the question.