President Donald Trump rebutted immigrants during last year's presidential election, pledging an unprecedented number of deportations.
According to CNN, in his first eight months, the promises have been changed to figures that include around 350,000 deportations, immigration and customs deportation (about 200,000), customs and border protection (over 132,000), and almost 18,000 self-reports.
ICE is on the centre stage with Trump's deportation campaign, raiding homes, workplaces and parks in search of undocumented immigrants. To support that effort, Ice is at his own willingness to use several technologies that allow him to identify and monitor individuals and communities.
Below is a summary of some of the technologies that ICE has at Digital Arsenal.
Cell Site Simulator Device
ICE has a technology known as a cell site simulator that snoops on mobile phones. These surveillance devices, as their names suggest, are designed to appear as mobile phone towers, making nearby phone calls and connecting. Once that happens, law enforcement using cell site simulators can find and identify nearby phones, potentially greet intercepting, texting, and internet traffic.
Cellsite simulators are also known as “Stingrays.” It is based on the brand name of one of the earliest versions of the technology created by US defense contractor Harris (now L3Harris). Or IMSI catchers, a technology that allows law enforcement to capture unique identifiers of nearby mobile phones that are used to identify phone owners.
Over the past two years, ICE has signed a more than $1.5 million contract with a company called TechOps Specialty Vehicles (TOSV), which produces customized vans for law enforcement.
According to the $800,000+ contract dated May 8, 2025, TOSV said it will “provide Cell Site Simulator (CSS) vehicles to support the Homeland Security Technology Operations Program.”
TOSV President Jon Brianas told TechCrunch that the company is not manufacturing cell site simulators, but is integrating them “in the entire vehicle design.”
Cellsite simulators have been causing controversy for a long time for several reasons.
These devices are designed to trick and connect all nearby phones. That is, by design, it collects data from many innocent people. Authorities may also deploy them without first obtaining warrants.
Authorities also tried to maintain confidential use of technology in court, withhold information and even remove cases, rather than disclosing information regarding the use of cell site simulators. A 2019 Baltimore trial revealed that prosecutors were instructed to suspend the lawsuit, rather than breaching a non-disclosure agreement with the company that manufactures the devices.
ClearView AI Facial Recognition
ClearView AI is perhaps the most well-known facial recognition company today. For years, the company had promised that it could identify faces by searching large databases of photographs scraped from the internet.
On Monday, 404 Media reported that ICE had signed a contract with the company to support the Law Enforcement Department's Homeland Security Investigation (HSI).
According to the government procurement database, the contract signed last week is worth $3.75 million.
ICE has signed other contracts with ClearView AI for the past few years. In September 2024, the agency purchased “Forensic Software” from the company. This is a transaction worth $1.1 million. The previous year, ICE paid a ClearView AI of nearly $800,000 for its “facial recognition enterprise license.”
ClearView AI did not respond to requests for comment.
Paragon Phone Spyware
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In September 2024, ICE signed a $2 million worth of contract with Israeli spyware manufacturer Paragon Solutions. Almost immediately, the Biden administration issued a “stop work order” and confirmed that it had complied with the government's executive order regarding the use of commercial spyware during its review of the contract.
Because of that order, the contract remained within range for almost a year. Then last week, the Trump administration lifted its suspension work order and effectively reactivated the contract.
At this point, the actual relationship between the paragon and the ice is unknown.
Last week's record entry said the Paragon contract was “a fully configured, proprietary solution that includes license, hardware, warranty, maintenance and training.” In fact, it can take some time for Ice to get your Paragon system to run, unless you have hardware installed and trained last year.
It is also unknown whether spyware will be used by ICE or HSI. HSI is an institution that does not limit investigations to immigration, but also covers online child sexual exploitation, human trafficking, financial fraud, and more.
Paragon has long tried to portray himself as a “ethical” and responsible spyware maker, but now he has to decide whether using Trump's ice is ethical or not. A lot happened to Paragon last year. In December, American private equity giant AE Industrial purchased the Paragon and planned to merge with cybersecurity company Redlattice, according to Israeli technology news site Calcalist.
Amidst the indication that a merger may have occurred, when TechCrunch contacted Paragon to comment on the revitalization of its ICE contract last week, we were introduced to Redlattice's new vice president of marketing and communications.
Redlattice's IRA also did not respond to requests for comments for this article or to requests for last week's article.
Over the past few months, Paragon has been caught up in a spyware scandal in Italy, with the government being accused of spying on journalists and immigration activists. In response, Paragon cut ties with the Italian intelligence agency.
Phone Hacking and Unlocking Technology
In mid-September, the ICE Law Enforcement Division Homeland Security Investigation signed a $3 million contract with Magnet Forensics.
This agreement is specifically for software licensing purposes only, allowing HSI agents to “recover digital evidence, process multiple devices” and “generate forensic reports” as described in the agreement.
Magnet is the current manufacturer of phone hacking and unlocking devices known as Graykey. These devices essentially provide the ability to connect law enforcement locked phones to them, unlock them and access data inside them.
Magnet Forensics, which merged with Graykey Makers Grayshift in 2023, did not respond to requests for comment.
Mobile phone location data
At the end of September, 404 Media reported that ICE could purchase access to “all-in-one” surveillance tools, allowing agents to search databases of historic mobile phone location data, and also purchasing social media information.
The tool appears to be made with two products called Tangles and Webbloc, and is made by a company called Penlink. One of the tools is committed to editing, processing, and verifying billions of location signals from hundreds of millions of mobile devices, and leveraging their own data platform to compile, process and verify billions of location signals from billions of mobile devices, according to an editorial agreement discovered by 404 Media.
The edited contract does not specify which tools make that promise, but given the explanation, it is probably Webrock. Forbes previously cited a case study in which Webloc searched for specific locations and said they were there in the trends and frequency of mobile devices that provided data at those locations.
Location data for this type of mobile phone is harvested by companies all over the world using software development kits (SDKs) embedded in regular smartphone apps. The latter process has the by-product of providing that type of personal data to AD Tech companies.
Once collected, this large amount of location data is transferred to a data broker, who sells it to government agencies. Thanks to this layered process, authorities use this type of data without getting a warrant just by purchasing access to the data.
According to Penlink's official website, another tool, Tangles is an AI-driven open source intelligence tool that automates “searching and analyzing data from Open, Deep and Dark Web.”
Forbes reported in September that ICE spent $5 million on two Penlink tools.
Penlink did not respond to requests for comment.
LexisNexis Legal and Public Records Database
For years, ICE has been using legal investigations and public record data broker LexisNexis to support investigations.
In 2022, two nonprofit organizations obtained the document via the Freedom of Information Act Requests. This revealed that ICE had performed over 12 million searches over seven months using a tool called corceint Virtual Crime Center. ICE used the tool to check background information for immigrants.
A year later, Intercept revealed that ICE was using LexisNexis to detect suspicious activity and investigate immigrants. Critics even investigated immigration before programs that allowed “mass surveillance” committed crimes.
According to public records, LexisNexis currently offers ICE with Law Enforcement Investigation Database Subscription (LEIDS).
This year, ICE paid $4.7 million to subscribe to the service.
LexisNexis spokesman Jennifer Richman told TechCrunch that ICE uses the company's products.
“Our commitment is to support the responsible ethical use of data, fully complying with laws and regulations, and protecting all residents of the United States,” LexisNexis added, “We will partner with over 7,500 federal, state, local, tribal and territorial agencies across the United States to improve public safety and safety across the United States.”
Surveillance major Palantia
Data analysis and surveillance technology giant Palantir signed several contracts with ICE last year. The largest contract worth $18.5 million since September 2024 is for a database system called “Investigation Case Management” or ICM.
The ICM contract dates back to 2022, with Palantir signing a $95.9 million contract with ICE. The relationship between the company founded in Peter Thiel and ice dates back to the early 2010s.
Earlier this year, 404 media outlets that extensively reported on Trump's deportation efforts, particularly technology that strengthens Palantir's relationship with ICE, revealed details on how the ICM database works. The Tech News site reported that it saw a recent version of the database. This allowed ICE to filter people based on immigration status, physical characteristics, criminal affiliation, location data, and more.
According to 404 Media, “sources familiar with databases” consist of “tables on a table” of data, and can create reports that show people who come to a specific visa from a particular country and come to the country at a specific port of entry who have a specific hair color (or hundreds of data points).
The tool's relationship with Palantier with ice leaked an internal wiki that justifies Palantier working on Trump's ice, as sources within the company are leaking to 404 media.
Palantir is developing a tool called “immigrants,” according to a $30 million deal revealed by Business Insider.
Immigration is said to be designed to streamline “illegal foreigner choices and manipulation of anxiety,” lead to self-denial “near real-time visibility” and track people staying on visas.
It was first published on September 13th, and updated on September 18th to include a new contract for Magnet Forensics, and again on October 8th with cell site simulator and location data.