ICE purchased more than $20 million worth of mobile surveillance tools just months before the election of a president who has vowed to undertake the largest mass deportation effort in U.S. history.
By Thomas Brewster, Forbes Staff
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency is well prepared for President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants when he takes office in January. In the three months prior to the November election, the agency signed $20 million in contracts for new phone hacking, surveillance and forensics technologies that can be used to spy on and track down the people he has vowed to expel from the country.
A Forbes review of recent ICE contracts found agreements to purchase an array of technologies that together can be used to surveil phone calls, texts and social media activity, identify people with facial recognition, remotely hack a smartphone and raid the contents of a device, including deleted data. These tools are made by a series of companies including Israel-based Paragon and Cellebrite, Canadian company Magnet Forensics, major American law enforcement contractor Pen-Link and the controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI. In the last five months, these companies received their largest federal purchase orders to date, all from ICE, contracting records show.
While ICE will likely also use these technologies across its responsibilities, which include the investigation of cybercrime and child exploitation, critics warn they will become a powerful tool in Trump’s war against undocumented immigrants.
Will Owen of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project described cellphone hacking spyware spending as “a frightening look at how the Trump administration plans to carry out mass deportations through authoritarian means,” adding “these technologies have been used in democracies around the world to undermine protected civil liberties.”
ICE hadn’t provided comment at the time of publication.
Public contract records show Israel-founded Cellebrite scored its biggest federal government contract to date in August, with a $9.6 million deal with ICE for unspecified “forensic equipment and services.” The company has built a reputation as one of the most technically adept providers of cellphone exploitation, where its software can find vulnerabilities in iOS and Android devices to break into locked devices and exfiltrate the information inside. Cellebrite has worked with law enforcement across the world, including the FBI, the London Metropolitan Police Service and the Russian government, though it chose to stop selling to the Kremlin in 2021. The day after Trump’s victory, Cellebrite announced record quarterly revenues of $106 million. Its stock hit a new high last week, up 165% from the start of the year, and hitting a $4.34 billion market capitalization.
Cellebrite chief marketing officer David Gee told Forbes the company’s new contract was with Homeland Security Investigations, a law enforcement agency within DHS ICE, which will use its tools to lawfully investigate crimes that threaten national security.
While HSI has a broad remit, the Brennan Center, a nonpartisan law and policy institute, noted last year that, “HSI frequently involves itself in routine immigration enforcement focused on deporting undocumented workers,” and called on the White House to rein in its surveillance capabilities. Gee did not clarify if its tech has been used to surveil immigrants.
Waterloo, Canada-based Magnet Forensics also secured its biggest federal contract to date in August, when ICE spent $5 million on licenses for Graykey, an Android and iPhone hacking tool. Magnet acquired the Graykey technology when it bought out Grayshift, an Atlanta startup cofounded by a former Apple employee in 2016, as first revealed by Forbes. Under the last Trump administration, ICE spent just over $1 million on Graykey tech. Later in August, ICE spent another $3 million on Magnet software, which helps investigators acquire and analyze data from smartphones and computers. Magnet hadn’t responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.
In recent months, ICE has made other significant investments in surveillance tech beyond phone forensics. In September, as first reported by Wired, it spent $2 million on Paragon, a mobile spyware provider that provides a tool called Graphite for surveilling encrypted messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp (Forbes profiled the company in 2021). The ICE contract was put on hold and placed under review by the White House, after revelations that other Israeli-made surveillance software from companies like NSO and Intellexa had been used to spy on journalists, activists and lawyers. Paragon declined to comment.
In June, ICE bought nearly $5 million in licenses from Pen-Link as part of an overall contract worth a potential $25 million. As Forbes previously reported, Pen-Link has wiretapping systems set up on phone lines across the U.S. and is working on numerous social media surveillance projects for American agencies. It also offers AI-powered analytics to find patterns in the glut of data from these sources. Pen-Link hadn’t responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.
Facial recognition provider Clearview AI signed its largest federal contract at $1.1 million, also with ICE, in September. In 2020, Clearview emerged as one of the more controversial facial recognition suppliers because it scraped the internet for images of individuals without their consent, then created a massive database from which cops could try to find matches. Clearview hadn’t responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.
There have been multiple calls for Clearview to be banned in the U.S. and in Europe it’s been fined and censured in multiple countries. Albert Fox Cahn, director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said U.S. lawmakers should go further and ban mobile surveillance tools too. “I just hope we don’t see too much harm done before we reach that point,” he added.
