ICE amps up its surveillance powers, targeting immigrants and antifa

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has been rapidly building out its surveillance capabilities in recent weeks, signing a string of contracts for technologies to identify individuals by their irises or facial features and to monitor their cellphone activity, social media posts and physical movements, according to a review of federal spending disclosures.

The blitz of surveillance purchases is motivated in large part by ICE’s intensive, nationwide campaign to find and deport undocumented immigrants. But documents show that some of the technology may also be used to target what the administration regards as anti-ICE extremist groups. Late last month, President Donald Trump declared “Antifa” a domestic terrorist organization in the wake of violent clashes and a Dallas shooting at an ICE facility, ordering all federal agencies to devote resources to investigating what he defined as “a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law.”

Shortly after Trump’s executive order, ICE’s acting director, Todd M. Lyons, told Glenn Beck in an interview that the agency will deploy some of its elite investigative officers to probe anti-ICE protester networks. “We have some of the best special agents, criminal investigators,” Lyons said on Beck’s podcast. “We are going to track the money. We are going to track these ringleaders.”

Lyons said the investigations will focus on “ringleaders” and “professional agitators” who he said are out to turn protests into violent confrontations. But Democratic lawmakers, civil rights watchdogs and former officials have expressed concern that ICE now has a green light not only to monitor immigrant communities, but also to carry out broad surveillance of Americans exercising their First Amendment right to oppose government action.

Technologies purchased by ICE in recent weeks include an iris-scanning app that agents plan to use in the field, spyware that can hack into smartphones remotely and cellphone location software that can enable the tracking of a phone’s movements without a court warrant.

“The acquisition and deployment of this technology in this environment is going to raise substantial concerns,” said John Sandweg, who was an acting director of ICE under the Obama administration.

In one contract that ICE signed last month for Clearview AI facial recognition software, the agency said in a filing that it would be used to investigate “assaults against law enforcement officers.” Other federal contracts show ICE has been expanding its fleet of small, remote-controlled drones, which it has said it is using to film protesters.

In early October, ICE also informed prospective vendors that it planned to set up a new social media monitoring hub to trawl platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp and TikTok to collect information on targets. The document identifies undocumented immigrants who have committed serious crimes as the primary focus but also deems domestic terrorism a top priority and says the contractor must be “flexible [about] shifting priorities.”

ICE’s contracted obligations in September tallied up to $1.4 billion, its highest monthly sum in at least 18 years, according to USASpending.gov. The upsurge in awards coincides with the agency’s access to more than $170 billion in funding that Congress allocated for border security and immigration enforcement in its July spending bill.

Many of those funds reflect long-term contracts that will be paid out over time in the future. Hundreds of millions of dollars are earmarked for technology products, according to a review of the contracts by The Washington Post, with major spending also on detention centers, air transport and guns.

A number of ICE’S surveillance orders this year are explicitly for immigration enforcement, such as a $30 million contract to Palantir to build ImmigrationOS, a platform for granularly tracking undocumented immigrants’ movements and any self-deportations. But U.S. officials have also begun to say that their efforts may serve the crackdown on antifa as well.

“Left-wing organizations have fueled violent riots, organized attacks against law enforcement officers, coordinated illegal doxing campaigns, arranged drop points for weapons and riot materials, and more,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement Thursday.

“The Trump Administration will get to the bottom of this vast network inciting violence in American communities,” she said, using a “whole-of-government approach to end any illegal activities.”

Responding to a request for comment, an ICE spokesperson said: “Like other law enforcement agencies, ICE employs various forms of technology to investigate criminal activity, while respecting civil liberties and privacy.”

After designating antifa a domestic terrorist organization last month, Trump directed all federal agencies to utilize “all applicable authorities” against anyone claiming to act on behalf of the movement. Trump and other administration officials have used the term “antifa” broadly to refer to protesters outside of ICE detention centers.

Whether antifa, a term derived from the word anti-fascist, exists as an organization is in dispute. In 2020, then-FBI director Christopher A. Wray told Congress antifa was a movement or ideology, not an organization or group. The Trump administration has not presented evidence that violent attacks against the president’s supporters or ICE this year are the work of a group, as opposed to individual actors.

In late September, after clashes erupted in Portland, Oregon, amid otherwise peaceful protests of ICE’s treatment of immigrants, Trump declared the ICE facility there “under siege from attack by Antifa” and ordered in the National Guard.

Lyons, in the interview with Beck last month, said ICE was “dedicated” to Trump’s mission of investigating what he called anti-ICE terrorism. The acting ICE chief told Beck that the presence of shields, rocks and tear gas grenades among protesters in Chicago was proof that anti-ICE activity was an issue of domestic terrorism, not free speech. Combating it, he added, would fall under the remit of ICE’s powerful Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit.

ICE has long wielded a sophisticated trove of surveillance technologies since it was founded in 2003, ranging from biometric databases to phone-hacking tools. But the new executive order to investigate antifa, critics say, gives the agency a broad new authority to surveil U.S. citizens who may not themselves be suspected of crimes.

“I’m extremely concerned about how ICE will use spyware, facial recognition and other technology to further trample on the rights of Americans and anyone who Donald Trump labels as an enemy,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) in a statement to The Post.

Wyden said ICE’s HSI unit provided an initial briefing to his staff in mid-September about its planned use of spyware, in which it indicated that the policies were still being written. ICE has not responded to follow-up emails since the government shutdown, Wyden said.

ICE’s recent technological purchases include a number of biometric tracking technologies that can help agents confirm individuals’ identities in the field. One is a $4.6 million contract signed Sept. 23 for an iris-scanning smartphone application from Plymouth, Massachusetts-based BI2 Technologies, which can match an image of a person’s eye in real time against a database of millions of records.

While ICE has used other iris-matching databases for years, the agency said in a filing that BI2’s mobile system would allow agents to verify identities not only in the office but also during field operations, calling it a “mission critical” requirement. It is BI2 Technologies’ first publicly disclosed contract with a federal agency. According to the company’s website, the software can get an identifying read on a person’s eye from a distance of up to 15 inches, even through eyeglasses. BI2 did not respond to a request for comment.

ICE’s $3.75 million order on Sept. 5 for Clearview AI’s facial recognition software is the largest public purchase of the technology to date by a U.S. federal agency, according to the Federal Procurement Data System. Clearview AI has become a popular tool among police, despite concerns that the technology is not always accurate. The Post reported in January that at least eight people have been wrongfully arrested after incorrect facial recognition matches. ICE said in its latest contract that the software would be used by its Dallas office to investigate child sexual exploitation cases and assaults against law enforcement officers. Clearview AI did not respond to a request for comment.

404 Media, an independent technology media company, reported first this year on ICE’S contracts for a number of surveillance products, including those from BI2 Technologies, Clearview AI and Penlink.

Also in early September, the agency bought a new Skydio X10D drone for $28,420.53, earmarked for Homeland Security enforcement operations, adding to a number of other drones it has purchased over the years. ICE posted drone footage of protesters and ICE officers clashing in Chicago on its Facebook page on Oct. 3.

The pinned post on ICE’ss official Facebook page is a warning to the agency’s critics that they will “Face the Consequences” of long prison sentences if they assault or impede officers, cyberstalk, dox or make threats online.

ICE has also purchased spyware in recent weeks that enables it to remotely hack into smartphones and extract data, even if the phones are locked or communication is over encrypted apps. One of them, developed by the company Paragon Solutions, has drawn considerable concern from civil rights groups due to its use by other governments to monitor political dissidents and journalists. ICE’s initial $2 million contract for Paragon spyware was suspended by the Biden administration due to those ethical concerns, but the contract was reactivated on Aug. 29.

Three Democratic lawmakers wrote a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem on Oct. 6 expressing concern over reports of ICE’s contract with Paragon for Graphite spyware. “Graphite can gain unauthorized access into mobile phones without the owner’s knowledge or consent, allowing access to encrypted applications, the phone’s location data, as well as messages and photographs saved to the phone,” Reps. Summer Lee (Pennsylvania), Shontel Brown (Ohio) and Yassamin Ansari (Arizona) wrote. Paragon lists no contacts; requests for comment to Redlattice, a related Virginia-based company, drew no response.

Maria Villegas Bravo, Electronic Privacy Information Center counsel, said ICE’s use of Paragon spyware raised questions of whether it infringed on the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable search and seizure, as well as the First Amendment’s protection of free speech and the rights to assembly and petition.

“We don’t know if law enforcement or ICE are getting search warrants to deploy this spyware,” she said. “It’s also a First Amendment issue because your phone contains all your communications, all your expressions … it has your contact lists, it has your social media. Any political organizing people do, it’s typically on social media now, or over the phone.”

A White House official contested that the administration’s enforcement efforts constitute a threat to First and Fourth Amendment rights. “The President’s actions are focused on entities and individuals engaged in organized political violence and domestic terrorism,” an official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with White House policy. “Any other characterization is inaccurate.”

Sandweg, the former ICE acting director, said some of the internal watchdog offices at ICE and its parent department, the Department of Homeland Security, once tasked with preventing misuse of its powerful investigative tools, have been defanged or closed under the Trump administration.

“Some of these guardrails are being lifted,” he said.

ICE also reported a $2 million contract for Penlink’s Tangles and Weblocs data systems on Sept. 25, which combine social media and dark web data to build detailed portraits of individuals. Weblocs allows clients to track the mobile phone location data of targeted individuals, information that government officials would otherwise need a warrant to obtain. Penlink did not respond to a request for comment.

In another project, ICE has disclosed in recent days its potential plans to set up a social media monitoring team of 16 analysts who would sift through information from social media platforms and other databases to generate leads to locate targeted individuals. An Oct. 2 “request for information,” which comes before soliciting bids for a project that could change, listed Facebook, X, TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit, WhatsApp, YouTube, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, Flickr, Myspace and Google as some of the platforms that the team would scour to find clues about the possible location of the target individual. The target’s family, friends and co-workers could also be probed.

While the overview says undocumented immigrants would be the main target for the social media team, the draft guidelines designate “domestic or international terrorism,” which under Trump’s executive order includes antifa, as being among the most urgent category of cases.

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• Douglas MacMillan, Naomi Nix and Jeremy Merrill contributed.