The Tech Tools of ICE: Drawing Inferences About Us

All over the country, people are hopping mad. The source of their ire: street cameras owned by Flock – all 120,000 of them. You may have seen the company’s signs that feature a line of waddling ducklings. Benign? Actually, no.

A few things set the Flock cameras apart. First, they are simple and solar-powered, requiring no infrastructure to set up. That makes them very at-tractive to police departments. Forty percent of police departments around the country have contracts with Flock. Second, they are used for controversial purposes. For example, Flock cameras capture not only your license plate, but your location, vehicle color, roof rack, and bumper stickers. In 2025, Flock was found to be reporting data gleaned through municipal contracts through an informal relationship with ICE. The Seattle Times reports that, in addition to tracking immigrants, police officers have used them for personal purposes, such as tracking the movements of their relationship partners. Third, they are interconnected. The platform provides a real-time map of your activities, gleaned without your knowledge or consent.

The interconnection, inferences drawn, and absence of consent are what set apart the current generation of technology tools deployed by ICE. In August’s Retiree Advocate, I began exploring the tech tools used by ICE and other government entities that are becoming more widely used to surveil activists, journalists, and communities, as well as immigrants. A recent report, The Tech Behind ICE: Oligarchs, Immigration Enforcement and the Threat to Democracy, (Mijente, Just Futures Law, Surveillance Resistance Lab, 2026), provides extensive detail about those surveillance tools and describes their implications for our privacy and daily lives.

Last month, I described technologies that hack cell phones, trace location, and build portraits of our locations, habits, relationships, calendars, and priorities. In this month’s article, I’ll look at tools we know exist, but don’t think of in the context of immigration enforcement.

The first of these is the sale of your information by data brokers. You’re aware of the unsolicited mailers you receive when it’s time to renew your insurance, and the ads that pop up on your computer screen when you’ve typed in a key word. The sale and purchase of our data is largely unregulated – and it’s prolific. This industry generates $250 - $330 billion in sales per year.

The largest of these ICE data broker contractors are NexisLexis and Thomson Reuters. They have developed huge inventories of data ranging from credit histories to background checks to property and court records. ICE synthesizes the data with information from other government agencies, generating comprehensive portraits of individuals, their daily lives, relationships, strengths, and vulnerabilities. Accurint, a platform of a LexisNexis subsidiary, holds 37 billion records, including the personal data of 95% of Americans. In 2021 alone, ICE made 1.2 million searches of that database. Thomson Reuters, which has a “risk mitigation” contract with ICE to keep ICE agents from harm, also provides information on the social media presence of immigrant justice activists. An Equifax subsidiary tracks data in real time related to jailing bookings and releases, enabling ICE agents to be on site when a person they are targeting is released.

Homeland Security also contracts with data analytics companies. These firms dissect voluminous data sets to draw inferences about how people will act. One platform, RAVEn, checks faces against immigration documents, workplace audits, and driver licenses, all without any notification to government entities or to the people being surveilled. DSHS owns the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology System (HART), the repository for biometric data gathering, such as iris scans. However, the system is mired in controversy; Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration policy, is orienting data collection to align the system’s capabilities with the administration’s immigration enforcement strategies.

Another tech tool used for surveillance is web scraping. Web scraping involves extracting data from sites across the internet, linking the data, and creating portraits of individuals, which are, of course, for sale. These portraits are used to target individuals for surveillance and deportation. Accuracy is reportedly not a priority and the process is rife with civil rights abuses.

Zignal is one such web scraping tool. It analyzes billions of social media posts, every single day, to identify whether people constitute threats. Its primary use in the US is for immigrant deportation. The company also has a contract with the Israeli military, for which it provides “tactical guidance” in Gaza. Another tool, Fivecast Onyx, gathers information from social media and generates suppositions about “sentiment and emotion.” A tool called RECON tracks internet usage, collecting personal information gleaned from internet providers, to develop detailed, dynamic portraits of users.

In next month’s Retiree Advocate, I’ll look at other technologies deployed by ICE and other government entities. Future articles in the series will explore the revolving door and conflicts of interest between tech company leadership, tech sector leadership, and government leadership. Finally, I’ll explore the strategies needed to build the movement to dislodge the surveillance state.