What do mobile libraries, parked ambulances and heavily armed, mask-wearing men have in common?
Intimate knowledge of US protesters’ social media activities and their locations.
The White House campaign to “clean up America’s streets” is getting personal.
US President Donald Trump’s favourite federal agency is prowling city streets, on the hunt for illegal immigrants and their supporters.
But he wants it to get better at its job.
The White House has set a quota of at least 3000 migrant arrests per day.
To achieve this goal, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency is spending big.
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Budget Bill is pumping $115 billion into the agency’s budget.
Most of this money will be sunk into a dramatic expansion of ICE, with up to 10,000 extra masked, body-armoured agents soon to be walking the beat.
But ICE has also advertised for up to 30 skilled personnel to form specialist, unsworn, investigation and intelligence teams.
These contractors will be tasked with using artificial intelligence to filter social media, selfies and SMS messages for plausible suspects.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) include compiling a comprehensive dossier on a designated high-interest individual within 30 minutes. They’ll get 24 hours to profile a generic protester.
And they’ll be expected to detail where the suspect is and is likely to go.
ICE says this data will be used by its combat-capable field agents to plan and execute arrests.
But controversy is swirling about the one US federal government agency not subject to the Trump Administration’s brutal DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) cuts or wide-ranging leadership culls.
Democrat Representative John Larson has labelled it a reincarnation of Nazi Germany’s SS secret police. Governor Tim Walks has called it a “modern-day Gestapo”.
And a federal judge appointed by President Ronald Regan has ruled: “ICE goes masked for a single reason, to terrorise Americans into quiescence”. Such comparisons are evocative. But some of ICE’s powers are cause for concern.
Warrantless arrests and searches. Deferred legal rights. Habeas corpus (due process) suspensions. Foreign detention centres. Restricted government oversight.
It gives ICE unprecedented, arbitrary powers and minimal accountability.
Now procurement records reveal ICE is seeking to build a powerful surveillance system capable of sifting social media in real time to identify those expressing “negative sentiment” toward the agency itself.
Surveillance technology can cut both ways.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) can attest to this.
A killing last month in Chicago was caught on bodycams carried by its agents, and on onlookers’ phones.
ICE insisted one of its agents had been “seriously injured” when dragged by the victim’s car.
But bodycam footage shows the officer saying “nothing major” had been done to him.
And ICE profiling of the alleged assailant appears erroneous.
DHS officials say its agents had shot and killed “a criminal illegal alien with a history of reckless driving”.
But local media investigations revealed the victim had no criminal history. And he had recorded no traffic violation notices since 2013. This information and footage were publicly available.
And the incident occurred in public.
But the DHS was outraged: “Viral social media videos and activists encouraging illegal aliens to resist law enforcement not only undermine public safety, but also the safety of our officers and those illegal aliens being apprehended,” a statement reads.
But it also finds potential in the public domain.
One draft new ICE contract expresses a desire to exploit “open source intelligence” to the full.
Historically, this would include public newspaper clippings, high school yearbooks and court records. But little else.
Now, this includes photos and messages on the likes of Facebook and X, YouTube and TikTok, Reddit and Quora. And, depending on who you ask, any leaked or poorly secured dataset — such as those from Optus, Qantas, and the MediSecure system — can be considered fair game.
Much of this has already been collected, sifted and packaged for sale.
Commercial projects, including LexisNexis Accurint, Thomson Reuters CLEAR, CrimeTracer, Lynx Sentinel, and CommandCentral Analytics, build and maintain vast, searchable datasets linking phone bills, property records, vehicle registrations, essential services bills, family trees, and much more.
This is sold to the likes of banks, insurance companies and hiring agencies to assess risk.
But it is also proving to be a quick, convenient—and unaccountable—service for government agencies.
But ICE wants more.
It has specified that its new surveillance contractors must help design artificial intelligence systems to automatically sniff out and track suspects through zettabytes of data. Some of it in real-time.
In the meantime, draft ICE planning documents reveal that they want teams of civilian contractors to provide an around-the-clock, on-call, profiling, and tracking service.
ICE is worried about the privacy and security of its agents.
That’s why it encourages its officers to wear masks and remove identifying badges and service numbers.
But it wants more.
“To prevent adversaries from successfully targeting ICE Senior leaders, personnel and facilities, ICE requires real-time threat mitigation and monitoring services, vulnerability assessments, and proactive threat monitoring services,” reads a procurement document issued earlier this year.
This includes: “Previous social media activity which would indicate any additional threats to ICE”, and “information which would indicate the individual(s) and/or the organisation(s) making threats have a proclivity for violence”.
But it’s not just about threats.
The contractors must “provide monitoring and analysis of behavioural and social media sentiment (i.e. positive, neutral, and negative)”.
Among ICE’s chief concerns is “doxxing”: revealing information about an agent, such as home address, phone number, and social media accounts.
ICE itself uses far more advanced information tactics, but for deportations rather than doxxing.
The Investigative Case Management (ICM) system is a $214m AI-based illegal-immigrant hunter supplied by Palantir Technologies (ironically named after the all-seeing, but corrupting, stone eyes of Lord of the Rings fame).
This is on top of a $7m yearly subscription to a database of commercial records and public data compiled by LexisNexis.
But ongoing commercial tenders reveal ICE’s desire to capture live social media and open source data inputs.
This, when combined with active phone records and facial recognition technology, could be used to automate the process of pinpointing the position of a designated target.
ICE recently bought access to PenLink’s Tangles and Webloc predictive algorithms that access “billions of pieces of location data from hundreds of millions of mobile phones”
It also pairs mobile phone tower “handshakes” to correlate phone user data to anonymous social media posts.
Another $1.5m has been spent on mobile cellphone tower interceptor systems designed to capture live phone calls and data package transmissions. Contractor TechOps Speciality Vehicles offers these in disguises ranging from “bookmobiles” (mobile libraries) to ambulances and fire trucks.
But intercepting signals is one thing. Then you have to read them.
ICE has reactivated a $3 million contract for Israeli Graphite spyware that had been suspended under the Biden Administration.
Created by Paragon, it can access messaging apps such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram.
And ICE has a $4 million contract to access Magnet Forensics’ hacking technology to break phone encryption systems.
So, exactly which person in that crowd should an agent arrest?
Last month, the federal agency sealed a $3 million deal with Clearview AI. This database has scraped billions of photos from social media services and the internet to build comprehensive facial recognition algorithms.
Knowledge, weaponised
A 30-year-old Chicago woman was shot five times by a Border Patrol agent last weekend. She had been among drivers trailing a Department of Homeland Security vehicle through suburban streets.
The DHS says the woman attempted to run over its agents.
But the woman’s lawyer says body camera footage appears to show the federal officers ramming her vehicle, with one officer yelling “Do something, bitch” as he leapt out of the car and opened fire.
Another officer asks: “Hey, what happened?” He is warned off by the first officer, who points to his camera, saying: “Hey, don’t speak. You’re good”.
Such violent encounters are becoming increasingly common.
One federal judge, appointed by US President Ronald Reagan, has compared the behaviour of masked ICE agents to the Ku Klux Klan.
“To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan. In all our history, we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police,” Massachusetts District Judge William Young stated in his 161-page deposition condemning the arrests of immigrant students who had protested against the war in Gaza.
A handful of House Democrats have brought their surveillance concerns to Capitol Hill.
In particular, they’re worried about the warrantless use of Paragon Solutions’ social-media monitoring tools.
“Given the Trump Administration’s disregard for constitutional rights and civil liberties in pursuit of rapid mass deportation, we are seriously concerned that ICE will abuse Graphite software to target immigrants, people of colour, and individuals who express opposition to ICE’s repeated attacks on the rule of law,” the House Oversight committee members wrote.
“Allowing ICE to utilise spyware raises serious questions about whether ICE will respect Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless search and seizure for people residing in the US.”
But that horse may have long since bolted.
A research review by Inderscience Publishers has found “social media surveillance is ubiquitous”.
“Social media surveillance operates on a global scale,” Inderscience warned.
“Data flows routinely across borders, and monitoring practices often involve cooperation between states and multinational corporations.”