Protesters hold signs as they march in Minneapolis against Immigration and Customs Enforcement in January. Photo / Octavia Jones, AFP
Masks, guns and tactical gear are unmistakable hallmarks of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.
Less visible is an array of intrusive technologies helping ICE locate and track undocumented immigrants and, increasingly, citizens opposed to the US Government’s deportation campaign.
These technologies, both visible and invisible, are transforming the front lines of immigration enforcement and political protest across America today.
Federal immigration officers fanning out across Minnesota and other parts of the country are newly equipped with an array of state-of-the-art surveillance technologies, thanks to a bill passed last northern summer that transformed Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the country’s most highly funded law enforcement agency.
ICE has wasted no time spending its war chest, buying new tools ranging from biometric trackers to mobile phone location databases, spyware and drones, while loosening restrictions on how it uses some of these technologies.
These new surveillance powers come at a time when ICE is also pushing the bounds of its traditional role of immigration enforcement.
In recent months, ICE leaders, backed by top Trump Administration officials, have asserted the authority to use all available tools to monitor and investigate anti-ICE protester networks, including US citizens.
Democratic lawmakers and civil rights groups say the agency’s expanding use of its surveillance tools infringes on privacy and free speech rights of immigrants and US citizens alike.
On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is a part, disclosed in an annual report that the agency has significantly expanded the operational scope for its use of facial recognition, AI and other advanced technologies. Here’s a look at some of the technologies in ICE’s tool kit.
NEC and Clearview AI
ICE started using facial recognition technology on the streets over the past year. A new app made by NEC, Mobile Fortify, enables ICE officers to immediately compare phone scans of faces and fingerprints they encounter in the field against databases containing individuals’ immigration status and other biographical information.
In the autumn, ICE purchased an iris-scanning mobile app that its manufacturer, BI2 Technologies, says can get an identifying read on a person’s eye within seconds from a distance of 38cm.
Some US citizens have reported having their faces checked in real time by ICE or Customs and Border Protection. “He used facial recognition with another system and it confirmed I was a citizen. They then let me go,” Bloomington, Minnesota, resident Julio Garcia said in a court declaration, describing how immigration agents detained him on January 9.
ICE, CBP, NEC and BI2 Technologies did not respond to requests for comment.
ICE and other federal agencies have been cautious about sweeping deployment of facial recognition systems because of concerns over privacy violations and inaccuracies in identifying individuals of colour.
A January 2025 DHS report said ICE restricted its use of the Clearview AI facial recognition system to investigations of child sexual exploitation and abuse. But when ICE signed a new US$3.75 million contract with Clearview AI in September, the agency indicated in the procurement record that it also would be used to investigate “assaults against law enforcement officers”.
Clearview AI said in a statement that its technology is “an after-the-fact research tool that uses publicly available images” to assist law enforcement investigations.
Motorola Solutions and Thomson Reuters
Licence plate readers use high-speed cameras to photograph cars and store that data in commercial or government databases. ICE officers can pull up a vehicle’s movement history or search for all vehicles in an area over a period of time, narrowing it down by the car’s colour, make or state of registration.
ICE ordered mobile licence plate readers from Motorola Solutions in the northern autumn and renewed a contract for Thomson Reuters’ database, which boasts more than 20 billion plate scans, including from private surveillance video feeds. Thomson Reuters has said this data can show, for instance, when an individual registered at one address regularly parks his or her car at another location.
Motorola Solutions and Thomson Reuters did not respond to requests for comment.
ICE uses other systems indirectly. After its access to Flock Safety licence plate readers owned by local police departments sparked controversy last year, Flock said in August that it had “paused” a “limited pilot” with ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit.
But ICE has been able to access Flock Safety data by asking friendly local police departments to help it run searches, according to local records obtained by several news outlets.
“Only our customers can control their data and decide with whom they share their data,” a Flock spokesman said, adding that ICE is not a customer.
L3Harris
Cell-site simulators, also called Stingrays, masquerade as cell towers and trick nearby cellphones to connect, allowing ICE officers to track a phone’s location in real time.
The devices, often mounted atop vehicles, are used in two ways. If officers already know the identifying number of the target phone, they can use the cell-site simulator to look for it. They also can scan for all cellphones in the area.
While cell-site simulators show the general location of a cellphone, they do not pinpoint its exact GPS co-ordinates, nor do they capture the content of communications on a device.
ICE agents must obtain a search warrant from a judge before deploying a Stingray from suppliers like L3Harris, though ICE guidelines name several emergency exceptions, such as “the need to protect human life or avert serious injury” being in “hot pursuit of a fleeing felon” or “to prevent the escape of a suspect or convicted felon from justice”. In 2023, DHS’ inspector general released a report finding that ICE agents had repeatedly disregarded the law requiring a warrant.
L3Harris did not respond to a request for comment.
Penlink
In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter vs United States that mobile phone location data revealed so much about people’s lives that authorities need a warrant to access it from phone companies.
“When the Government tracks the location of a cellphone it achieves near perfect surveillance,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the court opinion. Federal agencies found a work-around: They buy the information from commercial brokers.
These brokers obtain data from weather or mobile game apps whose users consent to tracking. The first Trump administration used such services for immigration enforcement, as reported by the Wall Street Journal in 2020, but ICE said in January 2024 it had stopped.
The agency has begun using commercial location data again.
In September, ICE purchased a subscription to one such database, Penlink’s Webloc, which allows agents to “geofence” a specific area and track all the phones within it.
ICE this month expressed interest in expanding its tool kit, issuing a “request for information” to prospective contractors on how ad tech and location data companies can assist the agency.
Penlink declined to comment.
Paragon Solutions, Cellebrite and Finaldata
ICE has a deep trove of digital forensics tools that allow it to hack into locked phones and computers, recover deleted files and read information in encrypted chats.
These powerful tools traditionally were limited to the agency’s investigations into terrorism, child smuggling and other serious transnational crimes, but during the second Trump Administration, leadership has ordered the shift of investigative resources across the agency toward the deportation drive.
As part of its buying spree last year, ICE signed contracts with the Israeli companies Paragon Solutions, which makes spyware that can hack into phones remotely, and Cellebrite, which allows agents to access the contents of locked phones it has seized and automatically sort the data.
It also bought Finaldata’s FinalMobile Forensics and other, similar software that can recover deleted data from devices.
Cellebrite said in a statement that its contract with DHS is for national security investigations.
“Cellebrite’s technology is forensic, requiring physical possession of a device and appropriate legal authority,” the company said.
Finaldata did not respond to a request for comment. Paragon does not publish contact information.
ICE had been trying to purchase the Paragon software for some time, but the Biden administration froze the order in 2024 to review whether it complied with an executive order against federal agents using spyware with foreign ties that could be a threat to the US Government. The freeze was reversed last year.
Skydio and General Atomics
Drones are an increasingly ubiquitous part of federal law enforcement agencies’ field operations, providing real-time aerial video back to a base.
One compact model purchased by ICE, the Skydio X10D, is advertised as being able to detect individuals from 12km away and identify them from 1.2km. Many models are equipped with night vision and thermal cameras.
Skydio did not respond to a request for comment.
ICE has been using small drones to monitor some protests over the past year. Its sister agency, US Customs and Border Protection, also flew a much larger, military-grade MQ-9 Predator over anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles last year.
While it is unclear what technologies were aboard that drone, the US Air Force has previously disclosed that it equipped some MQ-9 Predators produced by General Atomics with a “Gorgon Stare” system of hundreds of cameras that can track everything that moves across 100sq km in high definition.
General Atomics spokesman Mark Brinkley said the baseline MQ-9A drones include a high-definition camera system with infrared sensing and radar that can see through clouds, rain or fog. He said he could not speak to whether CBP made other upgrades.
CBP said in 2020 that cameras aboard its MQ-9 drones could discern clothing colour or whether someone carried a backpack but could not identify a face.
ICE signed a US$514,000 contract to purchase new drones in the autumn, indicating that they could play a larger role going forward. On January 16, the Federal Aviation Administration instituted a ban on third parties flying drones within 900m of ICE operations, giving ICE sole authority to monitor raids aerially.
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