Here’s the tech powering ICE’s deportation crackdown 

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

In his first eight months in office, that promise turned into about 350,000 deportations, a number that includes deportations by ICE (about 200,000), Customs and Border Protection (more than 132,000), and nearly 18,000 self-deportations, according to CNN.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has taken center stage in Trump’s mass deportation campaign, raiding homes, workplaces and parks in search of illegal immigrants. To aid its efforts, ICE has at its disposal numerous technologies capable of identifying and monitoring individuals and communities.

Here’s a summary of some of the technologies ICE has in its digital arsenal.

Cell site simulators

ICE has a technology known as cell site simulators to spy on cell phones. These surveillance devices, as their name suggests, are designed to appear as a cell phone tower, tricking nearby phones into calling them. Once this happens, law enforcement using cell location simulators can locate and identify phones in their vicinity, and potentially intercept calls, text messages, and Internet traffic.

Cell site simulators are also known as “stingrays”, based on the trade name of one of the earliest versions of the technology, made by US defense contractor Harris (now L3Harris); Or IMSI Catchers, a technology that can capture the unique identifier of a nearby cell phone that law enforcement can use to identify the phone’s owner.

In the past two years, ICE has signed contracts worth more than $1.5 million with a company called TechOps Specialty Vehicles (TOSV), which produces custom trucks for law enforcement.

The contract, worth more than $800,000, dated May 8, 2025, states that TOSV will provide “Cell Site Simulation Vehicles (CSS) in support of the Homeland Security Technical Operations Program.”

TOSV President John Brenas told TechCrunch that the company does not manufacture cell site simulators, but rather integrates them “into our overall vehicle design.”

Cell site simulators have always been controversial for several reasons.

These devices are designed to trick all nearby phones into calling them, which means that by design they collect the data of many innocent people. Authorities also sometimes deployed them without first obtaining a court order.

Authorities have also tried to keep their use of the technology secret in court, withholding information, and even accepting plea deals and dropping cases rather than revealing information about their use of cell site simulators. In a 2019 lawsuit in Baltimore, it was revealed that prosecutors were instructed to drop cases rather than violate a nondisclosure agreement with the company that makes the devices.

Clearview AI facial recognition technology

Clearview AI is perhaps the most well-known facial recognition company today. For years, the company promised the ability to recognize any face by searching a large database of images it obtained from the Internet.

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

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

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

Clearview AI did not respond to a request for comment.

Paragon phone spy software

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

Because of this, the contract remained in limbo for about a year. Then, last week, the Trump administration lifted the stop-work order, effectively reactivating the contract.

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

A records entry from last week said the contract with Paragon is for “a fully configured proprietary solution including licensing, hardware, warranty, maintenance and training.” In practice, unless the hardware has been installed and trained in the last year, it could take some time for ICE to get the Paragon system up and running.

It’s also unclear whether 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 it must decide whether working with Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) firm is ethical. A lot has happened for Paragon in the past year. In December, US private equity giant AE Industrial bought Paragon, with a plan to merge it with cybersecurity company RedLattice, according to Israeli technology news site Calcalist.

In a hint that the merger may be happening, 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 Erras.

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

In the past few months, Paragon has been caught up in a spyware scandal in Italy, where the government was accused of spying on journalists and immigration activists. In response, Paragon severed its ties with Italian intelligence agencies.

Technology to hack and unlock phones

In mid-September, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations Division signed a contract with Magnet Forensics for $3 million.

This contract is for software licenses specifically so HSI agents can “recover digital evidence, process multiple devices” and “generate forensic reports,” according to the contract description.

Magnet is the current manufacturer of phone hacking and unlocking devices known as Graykey. These devices essentially give law enforcement agents the ability to plug a locked phone into them, unlock it, and access the data inside.

Magnet Forensics, which merged with Graykey makers Grayshift in 2023, did not respond to a request for comment.

Mobile phone location data

At the end of September, 404 Media reported that ICE had purchased access to a “comprehensive” monitoring tool that allows the agency to search databases of historical mobile phone location data, as well as social media information.

The gadget appears to be made of two products called Tangles and Webloc, which are made by a company called Penlink. One tool promises to leverage “a proprietary data platform to collect, process and validate billions of daily location signals from hundreds of millions of mobile devices, providing forensic and predictive analytics,” according to a redacted contract found by 404 Media.

The revised contract doesn’t specify which one of the tools makes this promise, but given its description, it’s likely Webloc. Forbes previously cited a case study that said Webloc could search a particular site “to monitor trends of which mobile devices submitted data at those sites and how often they were there.”

This type of mobile location data is collected by companies around the world using software development kits (SDKs) included in regular smartphone applications, or through an online advertising process called real-time bidding (RTB) in which companies bid in real time to place an ad on a mobile user’s screen based on their demographic or location data. The latter process has the byproduct of giving ad tech companies this type of personal data.

Once collected, this mass of location data is transferred to a data broker who then sells it to government agencies. Thanks to this multi-layered process, the authorities used this type of data without obtaining a warrant, simply by purchasing access to the data.

The other, Tangles, is an “open source AI-powered intelligence” tool that automates “research and analysis of data from the open, deep, and dark web,” according to Penlink’s official website.

Forbes reported in September that ICE spent $5 million on two Penlink tools.

Penlink did not respond to a request for comment.

LexisNexis legal and public records databases

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

In 2022, two nonprofits obtained documents through Freedom of Information Act requests, which revealed that ICE conducted more than 1.2 million searches over a seven-month period using a tool called Accurint Virtual Crime Center. ICE used the tool to verify immigrants’ basic information.

A year later, The Intercept revealed that ICE was using LexisNexis software to detect suspicious activity and investigate immigrants even before they committed a crime, a program that one critic said enabled “mass surveillance.”

According to public records, LexisNexis currently provides ICE with a “Law Enforcement Investigation Database Subscription (LEIDS) that allows access to public records and business data in support of criminal investigations.”

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

Jennifer Richman, a spokeswoman for LexisNexis, told TechCrunch that ICE has used the company’s product’s “data and analytics solutions” for decades, across multiple departments.

“Our commitment is to support the responsible and ethical use of data, in full compliance with laws and regulations, and to protect all U.S. residents,” Richman said, adding that LexisNexis “collaborates with more than 7,500 federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial agencies across the United States to promote public safety and security.”

Surveillance giant Palantir

Data analytics and surveillance technology giant Palantir signed several contracts with ICE last year. The largest contract, worth $18.5 million as of September 2024, is for a database system called Investigative Case Management, or ICM.

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

Earlier this year, 404 Media, which has reported extensively on the technology supporting Trump’s deportation efforts, particularly Palantir’s relationship with ICE, revealed details about how the ICM database works. The technology news site reported that it had seen an updated version of the database, which allows ICE to filter people based on their immigration status, physical characteristics, criminal affiliation, location data, and more.

According to 404 Media, “a source familiar with the database said it consists of ‘tables upon tables’ of data and can generate reports that show, for example, who held a specific type of visa and who came into the country at a specific port of entry, who came from a specific country, and who had 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 inside the company leaked to 404 Media, an internal wiki where Palantir justified working with Trump’s ICE company.

Palantir is also developing a tool called ImmigrationOS, according to a $30 million contract revealed by Business Insider.

ImmigrationOS is said to be designed to streamline “selection and detention processes for illegal aliens,” give “near-real-time visibility” to self-deportations, and track people who have overstayed their visas, according to a document first reported by Wired.

It was first published on September 13 and was updated on September 18 to include the new Magnet Forensics contract, and again on October 8 to include cell site simulators and location data.