Inside ICE’s tech arsenal powering Trump’s mass deportation agenda 

This is an adapted excerpt from the Feb. 1 episode of “Velshi.”

Donald Trump handed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement a massive windfall in his One Big Beautiful Bill Act, making it America’s highest-funded law enforcement agency — with $85 billion to spend.

That kind of money buys a lot of tools, including some state-of-the-art technology that is powering the president’s mass deportation agenda.

According to new reporting from The Washington Post, ICE is making use of surveillance tech ranging from biometric trackers to cell phone location databases to spyware to drones, all while the administration loosens restrictions on how it uses some of these technologies.

As the Post reports, the Department of Homeland Security revealed in an annual report last week that the agency “has significantly expanded the operational scope for its use of facial recognition, AI and other advanced technologies.”

In a statement to the outlet, Homeland Security said what ICE is doing is “no different” than other law enforcement agencies, adding: “We are not going to divulge law enforcement sensitive methods.”

Over the past year, ICE started using facial recognition technology. You may have seen videos and pictures of officers holding up a phone to a person’s face while conducting immigration enforcement. What you are seeing is the real-time use of a new app called Mobile Fortify.

Officers have the ability to track a phone’s location in real-time through cell-site simulators, also known as “Stingrays.”

The app enables ICE to essentially scan a person’s face and fingerprints. Those scans are then compared against a database containing individuals’ immigration status and other personal information. So, if an officer scans the face of someone undocumented, the app will tell them.

Here’s how it works: An ICE agent uses a phone camera to record an image of a face. The software detects the face in the image and then extracts key facial features, converting the information into a digital profile. That profile is then checked against a database of faces. Once the comparison is complete, the system reports a possible match.

According to The Washington Post, ICE and other federal agencies previously have been cautious about using facial recognition technology, largely because of concerns about accuracy — especially when identifying people of color.

Studies show that facial recognition technology is, in fact, often inaccurate when it comes to people of color. A 2018 study titled “Gender Shades” published by the MIT Media Lab found error rates of just 0.8% for light-skinned men, compared with 34.7% for darker-skinned women.

A federal study conducted in 2019 supported those conclusions, finding that facial recognition works best on middle-aged white men.

In a statement, Homeland Security told the Post:

Mobile Fortify is a lawful law-enforcement tool developed under the Trump Administration to support accurate identity and immigration-status verification during enforcement operations. It operates with a deliberately high matching threshold and queries only limited CBP immigration datasets.

Another one of ICE’s tools includes the use of cell phone locations and phone location databases.

Officers have the ability to track a phone’s location in real time through cell-site simulators, also known as “Stingrays.” A Stingray tricks a phone into thinking it’s a cell tower, and when a suspect’s device connects to it, the officers can trace its location.

In law enforcement operations, stingrays are used in two main ways: If officers already know a phone’s ID number, they can use the simulator to track it down — or they can scan all the cell phones in the area.

As TechCrunch notes, some cell-site simulators can intercept regular calls, text messages and internet traffic. That means that anyone whose phone is in the vicinity of the Stingray could connect to it without even knowing.

ICE agents must obtain a search warrant from a judge before deploying a Stingray. But according to The Washington Post:

ICE guidelines name several emergency exceptions, such as ‘the need to protect human life or avert serious injury,’ being in ‘hot pursuit of a fleeing felon’ or ‘to prevent the escape of a suspect or convicted felon from justice.’

Then there are phone location databases. In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States that authorities need a warrant to access location data from phone companies, since it reveals so many details about a person’s life.

But federal agencies found a way to circumvent that ruling by buying the data from commercial brokers.

Commercial brokers collect location data from weather apps, mobile games and other software. These are apps and software in which users technically consent to tracking, often without realizing what that consent actually means.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the first Trump administration used these databases for immigration enforcement. But in January 2024, ICE said it had stopped the practice.

That is, until September of last year, when ICE quietly purchased a subscription to one such database, once again putting mass surveillance back on the table.

That brings us to another tool at their disposal: digital forensics. The Washington Post explains it this way: a seized device — your phone, for instance — is plugged into specialized hardware. This hardware allows ICE to hack into locked phones and computers, bypassing privacy protections to give law enforcement access to information like passwords, communications, locations, deleted files and even encrypted chats.

Most digital forensics tools cannot be conducted remotely; ICE would need to have physical possession of the device.

Traditionally, these invasive tools were limited to investigations into online child exploitation, human trafficking, financial crimes and other serious international crimes.

But according to The Washington Post, top Trump officials have ordered these investigative resources to be shifted toward Trump’s deportation drive.

Lastly, drones are increasingly becoming a part of field operations involving ICE and Border Patrol officers. The images captured by the drones send back real-time information to a base.

At the border, drones have been used to detect migrants. But The Washington Post says ICE has been using small drones to monitor some protests over the past year.

In the fall, ICE signed a $514,000 contract to purchase new drones, signaling that they may play a larger role going forward.

Those are just some of the powerful tools in ICE’s arsenal — at least the ones we are aware of.

Allison Detzel contributed.