\n<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump made countering immigration one of his flagship issues during last year\u2019s presidential campaign, promising an unprecedented number of deportations.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In his first eight months in office, that promise turned into around 350,000 deportations, a figure that includes deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (around 200,000), Customs and Border Protection (more than 132,000), and almost 18,000 self-deportations, according to CNN.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
ICE has taken center stage in Trump\u2019s mass deportation campaign, raiding homes, workplaces, and public parks in search of undocumented immigrants. To aid its efforts, the ICE has at its disposal several technologies capable of identifying and surveilling individuals and communities.<\/p>\n
Here is a recap of some of the technology that ICE has in its digital arsenal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Clearview AI is perhaps the most well-known facial recognition company today. For years, the company promised to be able to identify any face by searching through a large database of photos it had scraped from the internet.\u00a0<\/p>\n
On Monday, 404 Media reported that ICE has signed a contract with the company to support its law enforcement arm Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), \u201cwith capabilities of identifying victims and offenders in child sexual exploitation cases and assaults against law enforcement officers.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to a government procurement database, the contract signed last week is worth $3.75 million.\u00a0<\/p>\n
ICE has had other contracts with Clearview AI in the last couple of years. In September 2024, the agency purchased \u201cforensic software\u201d from the company, a deal worth $1.1 million. The year before, ICE paid Clearview AI nearly $800,000 for \u201cfacial recognition enterprise licenses.\u201d<\/p>\n
Clearview AI did not respond to a request for comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\t\t\tDo you have more information about ICE and the technology it uses? We would love to learn how this affects you. From a non-work device, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram and Keybase @lorenzofb, or email. You also can contact TechCrunch via SecureDrop.\t\t<\/p>\n
In September 2024, ICE signed a contract worth $2 million with Israeli spyware maker Paragon Solutions. Almost immediately, the Biden administration issued a \u201cstop work order,\u201d putting the contract under review to make sure it complied with an executive order on the government\u2019s use of commercial spyware.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Because of that order, for nearly a year, the contract remained in limbo. Then, last week, the Trump administration lifted the stop work order, effectively reactivating the contract.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At this point, it\u2019s unclear what\u2019s the status of Paragon\u2019s relationship with ICE in practice.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The records entry from last week said that the contract with Parago is for \u201ca fully configured proprietary solution including license, hardware, warranty, maintenance, and training.\u201d Practically speaking, unless the hardware installation and training were done last year, it may take some time for ICE to have Paragon\u2019s system up and running.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also unclear if the spyware will be used by ICE or HSI, an agency whose investigations are not limited to immigration, but also cover online child sexual exploitation, human trafficking, financial fraud, and more.<\/p>\n
Paragon has long tried to portray itself as an \u201cethical\u201d and responsible spyware maker, and now has to decide if it\u2019s ethical to work with Trump\u2019s ICE. A lot has happened to Paragon in the last year. In December, American private equity giant AE Industrial purchased Paragon, with a plan to merge it with cybersecurity company Red Lattice, according to Israeli tech news site Calcalist.<\/p>\n
In a sign that the merger may have taken place, when TechCrunch reached out to Paragon for comment on the reactivation of the ICE contract last week, we were referred to RedLattice\u2019s new vice president of marketing and communications Jennifer Iras.\u00a0<\/p>\n
RedLattice\u2019s Iras did not respond to a request for comment for this article, nor for last week\u2019s article.<\/p>\n
In the last few months, Paragon has been ensnared in a spyware scandal in Italy, where the government has been accused of spying on journalists and immigration activists. In response, Paragon cut ties with Italy\u2019s intelligence agencies.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For years, ICE has used the legal research and public records data broker LexisNexis to support its investigations.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 2022, two non-profits obtained documents via Freedom of Information Act requests, which revealed that ICE performed more than 1.2 million searches over seven months using a tool called Accurint Virtual Crime Center. ICE used the tool to check the background information of migrants.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
A year later, The Intercept revealed that ICE was using LexisNexis to detect suspicious activity and investigate migrants before they even committed a crime, a program that a critic said enabled \u201cmass surveillance.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to public records, LexisNexis currently provides ICE \u201cwith a law enforcement investigative database subscription (LEIDS) which allows access to public records and commercial data to support criminal investigations.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
This year, ICE has paid $4.7 million to subscribe to the service.\u00a0<\/p>\n
LexisNexis spokesperson Jennifer Richman told TechCrunch that ICE has used the company\u2019s product \u201cdata and analytics solutions for decades, across several administrations.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOur commitment is to support the responsible and ethical use of data, in full compliance with laws and regulations, and for the protection of all residents of the United States,\u201d said Richman, who added that LexisNexis \u201cpartners with more than 7,500 federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial agencies across the United States to advance public safety and security.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Data analytics and surveillance technology giant Palantir has signed several contracts with ICE in the last year. The biggest contract, worth $18.5 million from September 2024, is for a database system called \u201cInvestigative Case Management,\u201d or ICM.<\/p>\n
The contract for ICM goes back to 2022, when Palantir signed a $95.9 million deal with Palantir. The Peter Thiel-founded company\u2019s relationship with ICE dates back to the early 2010s.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, 404 Media, which has reported extensively on the technology powering Trump\u2019s deportation efforts, and particularly Palantir\u2019s relationship with ICE, revealed details of how the ICM database works. The tech news site reported that it saw a recent version of the database, which allows ICE to filter people based on their immigration status, physical characteristics, criminal affiliation, location data, and more.\u00a0<\/p>\n
404 Media cited \u201ca source familiar with the database,\u201d who said it is made up of \u2018tables upon tables\u2019 of data and that it can build reports that show, for example, people who are on a specific type of visa who came into the country at a specific port of entry, who came from a specific country, and who have a specific hair color (or any number of hundreds of data points).\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The tool, and Palantir\u2019s relationship with ICE, was controversial enough that sources within the company leaked to 404 Media an internal wiki where Palantir justifies working with Trump\u2019s ICE.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Palantir is also developing a tool called \u201cImmigrationOS,\u201d according to a contract worth $30 million revealed by Business Insider.\u00a0
ImmigrationOS is said to be designed to streamline the \u201cselection and apprehension operations of illegal aliens,\u201d give \u201cnear real-time visibility\u201d into self-deportations, and track people overstaying their visa, according to a document first reported on by Wired.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
President Donald Trump made countering immigration one of his flagship issues during last year\u2019s presidential campaign, promising an unprecedented number of deportations.\u00a0 In his first eight months in office, that promise turned into around 350,000 deportations, a figure that includes deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (around 200,000), Customs and Border Protection (more than 132,000),<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21061,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[3095,4280,613,12921,12314,812],"class_list":{"0":"post-21060","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-crackdown","9":"tag-deportation","10":"tag-heres","11":"tag-ices","12":"tag-powering","13":"tag-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21060\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}