Ice Taps New Surveillance Tech As Trump Cuts Down Privacy Protections

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is buying millions of dollars’ worth of new surveillance tools at the same time President Donald Trump has scaled back protections for use of civilian data — a combination that could lead to a vast expansion of domestic surveillance that goes far beyond immigrants.

Federal records show that ICE has increased its spending on surveillance technology, looking to spend more than $300 million under Trump for social-media monitoring tools, facial recognition software, license plate readers and services to find where people live and work.

These upgrades are expected to be used in ICE’s push to help fulfill the president’s campaign promise of “the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America."

The high-tech capabilities are also coinciding with policy changes from the White House that lower the guardrails around the government’s use of data on millions of American residents and expand its potential surveillance targets. A set of executive orders is giving ICE workarounds for the decades-old federal standard that protects American residents' privacy, and the agency itself is signaling a shift in its enforcement policy, looking beyond immigrants and toward American critics of its officers’ behavior.

ICE’s new capabilities and legal flexibility are raising concerns among privacy and civil liberty advocates that it is expanding its remit with little supervision of its powers.

“It’s very troubling, especially when you pair the ramp-up of these capabilities and the increasing exercises of these capabilities with the undermining of independent oversight,” said Sharon Bradford Franklin, who chaired a board tasked with independently scrutinizing government surveillance following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

A White House spokesperson referred POLITICO to ICE for questions about the agency's operations. ICE did not respond to questions about its protections against potentially excessive surveillance.

Governors in several blue states have already responded by restricting ICE’s access to state-level citizen data. New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Washington recently cut off ICE’s access to their state motor vehicle records. In Congress, a coalition of 40 Democrats asked other governors to follow, saying in a letter that ICE’s access to DMV records allowed for “unjustified, politicized actions” from the Trump administration.

ICE’s use of facial recognition to determine immigration status has particularly troubled Democrats who worry the technology puts Americans at risk of detention and deportation.

The House Homeland Security Committee’s ranking member, Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.). criticized it as a “frightening, repugnant, and unconstitutional attack on Americans’ rights and freedoms” in a statement to POLITICO.

Republicans have been more accepting of ICE’s expanded surveillance capabilities, though still within limits.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who has criticized the Biden administration’s surveillance against conservatives, told POLITICO that he supports ICE’s acquisition of surveillance tech “so long as it’s done constitutionally.”

“Acquiring the stuff, that’s no problem,” he said, citing the importance of Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches by the government. “How they use it really matters.”

Buying tech, and broadening the mission

ICE’s technology arsenal has sharply increased in the past year, with the agency investing in high-tech surveillance tools including social media monitoring powered by artificial intelligence, software to obtain phone location data, drones, license plate readers and iris scanners.

One of its largest investments is for “skip-tracing” services, typically used by debt collectors and bounty hunters to track people who are difficult to find, across new identities, homes and occupations.

These capabilities were not used by ICE in past administrations. They were recommended to the Trump White House as part of a sweeping crackdown strategy submitted by private military contractors last December.

In October, ICE awarded two contracts for skip-tracing capabilities totaling $8 million. It vastly expanded its ambitions in November, issuing a request for information for the data-intensive tracking service with a potential $281 million contract attached. In December, ICE awarded contracts to 10 companies for skip tracing services, with the potential to earn over $1 billion by the end of their contracts in 2027, The Intercept reported.

A spokesperson for ICE said the November request wasn’t a formal spending plan, but was intended as “market research” to see how many vendors could fulfill an order of this size.

In September ICE paid $3.8 million for facial recognition tools from the company Clearview AI, which operates a database of 30 billion images scraped from online sources.

ICE also plans to expand its use of social media surveillance, WIRED reported in October, scouring billions of online posts to find leads for immigration enforcement operations.

As the agency upgrades its tools, it has also sent signals it wants to expand its mission from finding immigrants to tracing critics and stopping threats to its agents.

The contract for Clearview AI, for instance, said the technology would be used for investigations on assaults against law enforcement officers.

In August, the agency signaled it wants to use social media surveillance to track threats against ICE personnel by members of the public, according to a Privacy Impact Assessment published by DHS.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has also expanded what’s considered a threat to ICE officials, telling reporters in July that “violence is anything that threatens them and their safety,” including filming its officers.

Privacy advocates argue that this new technological capability — and the mission of tracking threats against agents — widens ICE’s surveillance scope beyond immigration enforcement in dangerous ways.

“ICE is already well beyond their initial responsibility and is fully into the realm of political policing of protesters and dissidents,” Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst on surveillance and technology at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been tracking the growth of government surveillance capabilities.

“They’re building up this mass automated surveillance infrastructure,” he added, “and the question we have to be asking is: What is it for?”

(ICE did not respond to a request for comment about changes in its policies on surveillance targets.)

Data guardrails going down

Those high-tech new tools and expanded mission arrive as the Trump administration has largely cleared the way for ICE to use civilian data more broadly, and with fewer constraints, than ever before.

Since 1974, the Privacy Act has prevented the federal government from creating a centralized database of all Americans’ information, recognizing the potential it holds for surveillance and abuse of people’s privacy. The law ensures that information a person handed over for public benefits like Medicare or Social Security can’t be easily repurposed by other agencies, including law enforcement.

ICE, however, has signed broad data-sharing agreements with multiple agencies, including the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Health and Human Services.

To justify its access, ICE has cited a suite of executive orders that Trump signed earlier this year on immigration enforcement and fraud prevention. One of the orders directs the government to “identify all resources” across agencies to screen immigrants seeking admission or already in the U.S. Another says agencies should give designated officials full access to records for removing “waste, fraud and abuse.”

The Privacy Act provides exemptions for law-enforcement agencies to pursue specific individuals and investigations, but not for them to access bulk data on American residents. ICE’s agreements appear to enable bulk data collections, however.

ICE’s data-sharing agreement with the SSA projects it will request up to 50,000 records a month, which includes addresses, banking data and contact information. Under its agreement with the IRS, ICE requested more than a million records in the four months after it was signed in April.

The executive orders — five in total — don’t override the Privacy Act’s protections, but they do help build the government’s legal defense for data access.

They have also been used to change policies: ICE issued a memo in October rescinding its 2013 policy on use of HHS data, citing the executive orders. The policy had originally stated that ICE would not use health coverage eligibility information to carry out immigration enforcements, but the October memo revoked that restriction, giving it free rein to use the health coverage data.

The orders give the new data-sharing agreements a modicum of legal protection if they were to be challenged, said Alex Joel, a former civil liberties protection officer for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

“The agency’s actions would be less likely to appear arbitrary or ill-considered, but rather, would form part of a concerted interagency effort to achieve a national goal set by the head of the Executive Branch,” Joel said.

He pointed to a similar shift in government surveillance after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when agencies cited Bush administration’s executive orders “as part of the playbook” to justify new information-sharing policies.

The policy changes have alarmed watchdogs, who worry that the Trump administration has removed guardrails meant to protect people from government surveillance.

“This accumulation of an immense amount of data, spanning across society and reaching into places that need to gather data about people in order for them to survive, underscores how new and dangerous it is,” American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California’s technology attorney Jake Snow, who defended an anonymous Instagram account from a DHS subpoena, said.

In any previous administration, surveillance overreach could also have been reined in by the government watchdogs on privacy and civil liberties issues, but those have been hollowed out.

Trump fired a wave of inspectors general and government watchdogs in January, including Bradford Franklin, who was chair of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, the post-9/11 agency created in 2007 to oversee government surveillance.

Franklin said the firings prevent independent oversight of the government’s interpretation of its own legal limits.

“Having vigorous independent oversight can really play a critical role to pair with the guardrails that are codified in laws and rules, and help when you are encountering these difficult situations,” she said.

A Financial Times report found that internal safeguards for privacy at ICE have also been reduced to a “rubber stamp” process.

ICE heads to court

Opponents of ICE’s expansive use of data hope to use the courts to prevent the Trump administration from creating a centralized database of people’s information.

They have filed multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration, alleging it violated privacy protections by sharing agencies’ data with ICE and repurposing the information for immigration enforcement.

The legal battles have gone back and forth: Judges have issued temporary freezes on ICE’s access to Medicaid data and taxpayer information, while the White House continues to make its case for why it is legally entitled to agencies’ data collection.

Under legal scrutiny, the Trump administration has walked back some of its data requests. Although ICE’s memo in October argued that the agency is entitled to obtain a wide range of HHS data for immigration enforcement, an attorney for the Trump administration told a federal judge at a hearing on Dec. 9 that the agency’s request was much narrower.

“ICE’s policy intent here and what they are seeking is information on individuals with unsatisfactory immigration status, rather than all individuals,” the Justice Department’s Michael Gerardi said at the hearing.

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria, an Obama-nominated official, said he was open to the narrowed interpretation, but raised concerns about the potential chilling effect that ICE’s access to data on Medicaid recipients could have on public healthcare before extending the freeze until a hearing in January.

“What sort of harm is this going to do to the federal-state goal of delivering healthcare to the nation’s most indigent residents?” he asked.

Gabby Miller contributed to this report.