Tag: September

President Donald Trump made countering immigration one of his flagship issues during last year’s presidential campaign, promising an unprecedented number of deportations. 

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.  

ICE has taken center stage in Trump’s 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.

Here is a recap of some of the technology that ICE has in its digital arsenal. 

Clearview AI facial recognition

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. 

On Monday, 404 Media reported that ICE has signed a contract with the company to support its law enforcement arm Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), “with capabilities of identifying victims and offenders in child sexual exploitation cases and assaults against law enforcement officers.” 

According to a government procurement database, the contract signed last week is worth $3.75 million. 

ICE has had other contracts with Clearview AI in the last couple of years. In September 2024, the agency purchased “forensic software” from the company, a deal worth $1.1 million. The year before, ICE paid Clearview AI nearly $800,000 for “facial recognition enterprise licenses.”

Clearview AI did not respond to a request for comment. 

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Paragon phone spyware

In September 2024, ICE signed a contract worth $2 million with Israeli spyware maker Paragon Solutions. Almost immediately, the Biden administration issued a “stop work order,” putting the contract under review to make sure it complied with an executive order on the government’s use of commercial spyware. 

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. 

At this point, it’s unclear what’s the status of Paragon’s relationship with ICE in practice. 

The records entry from last week said that the contract with Parago is for “a fully configured proprietary solution including license, hardware, warranty, maintenance, and training.” Practically speaking, unless the hardware installation and training were done last year, it may take some time for ICE to have Paragon’s system up and running.

It’s 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.

Paragon has long tried to portray itself as an “ethical” and responsible spyware maker, and now has to decide if it’s ethical to work with Trump’s 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.

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’s new vice president of marketing and communications Jennifer Iras. 

RedLattice’s Iras did not respond to a request for comment for this article, nor for last week’s article.

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’s intelligence agencies. 

LexisNexis’ legal and public records databases

For years, ICE has used the legal research and public records data broker LexisNexis to support its investigations. 

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.   

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 “mass surveillance.”

According to public records, LexisNexis currently provides ICE “with a law enforcement investigative database subscription (LEIDS) which allows access to public records and commercial data to support criminal investigations.” 

This year, ICE has paid $4.7 million to subscribe to the service. 

LexisNexis spokesperson Jennifer Richman told TechCrunch that ICE has used the company’s product “data and analytics solutions for decades, across several administrations.”

“Our 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,” said Richman, who added that LexisNexis “partners with more than 7,500 federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial agencies across the United States to advance public safety and security.” 

Surveillance giant Palantir

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 “Investigative Case Management,” or ICM.

The contract for ICM goes back to 2022, when Palantir signed a $95.9 million deal with Palantir. The Peter Thiel-founded company’s relationship with ICE dates back to the early 2010s. 

Earlier this year, 404 Media, which has reported extensively on the technology powering Trump’s deportation efforts, and particularly Palantir’s 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. 

404 Media cited “a source familiar with the database,” who said it is made up of ‘tables upon tables’ 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).” 

The tool, and Palantir’s relationship with ICE, was controversial enough that sources within the company leaked to 404 Media an internal wiki where Palantir justifies working with Trump’s ICE. 

Palantir is also developing a tool called “ImmigrationOS,” according to a contract worth $30 million revealed by Business Insider. ImmigrationOS is said to be designed to streamline the “selection and apprehension operations of illegal aliens,” give “near real-time visibility” into self-deportations, and track people overstaying their visa, according to a document first reported on by Wired.