ICE is one of the most technologically equipped law enforcement agencies in the country. None of what follows is speculation. It comes from government contracts, procurement records, and investigative reporting.
The Surveillance Stack
Commercial Location Data
The Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States that the government needs a warrant for cellphone location data. Federal agencies found a workaround: they buy it from commercial brokers instead. ICE purchased a subscription to Penlink's Webloc database, which lets agents geofence an area and track every phone inside it. No warrant required. If your phone has apps with location access, your movements are for sale.
Facial Recognition
ICE signed a $3.75 million contract with Clearview AI in September 2025. Clearview's database holds billions of photos scraped from social media, news sites, and public records. Agents use a phone app to photograph a face and run it against those databases in real time. Palantir built a tool called ELITE that generates instant dossiers on individuals, including a probability score for where they will be at a given time.
License Plate Readers
ALPR cameras capture plates and tie them to time and location. ICE uses this data to reconstruct vehicle movements over weeks, months, or years. Flock Safety alone operates cameras in over 5,000 communities. DeFlock.me has mapped over 76,000 ALPR cameras across the U.S.
Phone Forensics and Spyware
ICE renewed an $11 million contract with Cellebrite and signed a $3 million deal with Magnet Forensics. These tools crack a confiscated phone and extract everything: apps, location history, photos, call records, texts, Signal messages, WhatsApp messages. ICE also resumed a $2 million contract with Paragon, maker of Graphite spyware, which infiltrates phones remotely and pulls encrypted messages without the owner knowing.
Data Sharing Agreements
ICE has data-sharing agreements with the SSA, the IRS, and HHS.
Under its SSA agreement, ICE can request up to 50,000 records per month — addresses, banking data, contact information. Reports indicate ICE pulled over a million records from the IRS in the first four months.
Social Media Monitoring
ICE purchases tools that scrape public posts, map connections, and flag activity patterns. These tools are marketed for monitoring protests and public gatherings — far beyond immigration enforcement.
What You Can Do
You will not become invisible to a federal agency with a multi-billion-dollar surveillance budget. But most of what ICE accesses is commercial data, not government data. That is the part you control.
Kill Location Sharing
Audit every app with location access. Disable it for weather apps, games, shopping apps, and social media. These feed commercial location databases. Use a VPN to mask your IP.
Remove Yourself from Data Brokers
Spokeo, BeenVerified, WhitePages, Radaris, and hundreds more aggregate your name, address, phone, and relatives into searchable profiles. Anyone can buy this data — including government agencies. Opt out individually. There are over 500 broker sites, and new ones appear constantly.
Reduce Facial Recognition Exposure
Minimize public photos. Lock down social media visibility. Clearview AI offers opt-outs for residents of CA, CO, CT, IL, UT, and VA. Strip EXIF metadata from any photo before posting it.
Secure Your Phone
Use a passcode, not just biometrics — courts have ruled police can compel a fingerprint unlock but not a passcode in some jurisdictions. Enable full-disk encryption. Keep your OS current. If your phone could be confiscated, leave it home or carry a burner with nothing on it.
Who This Affects
Everyone. Commercial surveillance does not check citizenship. If your data sits in a broker database, it is accessible. If your face exists in a photo online, it is searchable. The tools built for immigration enforcement are already being used for domestic surveillance — tracking protesters, building dossiers on citizens and non-citizens alike. This is not a partisan issue. It is a structural one.
Government agencies buy what is commercially available. If your data is not for sale, it is harder to find.
— J. Daniel, Dark Scrub