Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is rapidly building out its surveillance arsenal, raising new concerns among civil liberties advocates about warrantless monitoring of Americans. Since the passage of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July, which earmarked an estimated $75 billion for the agency over four years, ICE has moved aggressively to acquire cutting-edge surveillance technologies.
Tracking location without warrants
The latest acquisition, revealed Tuesday in documents obtained by 404 Media, gives ICE access to billions of daily location signals harvested from hundreds of millions of smartphones and other connected devices. The data is provided through a contract with Penlink, a company that sources such information from app-based data brokers. Because many apps sell users’ location data, the government can buy this information rather than obtaining a warrant.
The move marks a sharp policy reversal. Under President Joe Biden, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), ICE’s parent agency, was prohibited from purchasing commercial location data after it was found to have previously overstepped legal limits. The return to mass location data collection under Trump expands ICE’s ability to track people without judicial oversight.
Beryl Lipton, a senior researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the acquisitions “indiscriminate and warrantless data collection” that could enable ICE to target “law-abiding citizens and protestors” alongside individuals under investigation.
Phone hacking and social media monitoring
ICE is also investing in new methods for breaching personal devices. In September, the agency signed a $2 million contract with Paragon for its “Graphite” software, which enables remote phone hacking. Later that month, ICE signed an $11 million deal with Cellebrite, a company whose forensic tools specialize in cracking locked phones in government custody.
At the same time, ICE has been expanding its social media surveillance. Contracts worth more than $5 million with the surveillance firm Cobwebs provide access to AI-driven platforms such as Tangles, which scours the open internet and dark web for posts, contacts, locations, and leaked personal data. According to Forbes, Tangles can build daily-life profiles of targeted individuals and even run facial recognition across its datasets. Another Cobwebs product, WebLoc, tracks mobile device presence in specific locations to determine patterns of movement.
Building on existing surveillance systems
In addition to purchasing new tools, ICE has tapped into already widespread policing technologies. Earlier this year, it was revealed that ICE had gained access to AI-powered license plate scanning data collected by local police departments, despite lacking a direct contract with the vendor, Flock Safety.
Other acquisitions include nearly $1 million in cell-site simulators—known as IMSI-catchers or Stingrays—that mimic cell towers to intercept phone data. One such device was detected at a protest outside an ICE facility in Washington state just weeks after the purchase.
Leaked internal emails in June also showed ICE’s use of Mobile Fortify, an app capable of identifying individuals by fingerprint or face. The app links facial recognition scans to U.S. Customs and Border Protection photos taken when people enter or exit the country. More recently, documents revealed that ICE has acquired mobile AI systems capable of scanning and identifying individuals based on retina data.
An unprecedented surveillance network
Taken together, ICE’s acquisitions represent a dramatic expansion of the agency’s surveillance powers. Combined with access to medical records, biometric databases, and data-sharing agreements with local law enforcement, the agency now wields more investigative and tracking tools than at any point in its history.
Civil liberties experts warn that these tools, many of which bypass traditional warrant requirements, risk sweeping up ordinary Americans in vast government monitoring programs. As Lipton of the EFF put it, ICE’s new capabilities “fundamentally change the relationship between the government and the governed,” expanding law enforcement reach while weakening privacy protections.
