The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is reportedly attempting to acquire access to a powerful suite of highly controversial surveillance tools that would allow the agency to track people's locations based on data from hundreds of millions of mobile phones, The Independent reports, writes UNN.
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The move, which comes after immigration agencies in the U.S. scaled back their use of such data under the administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden, has alarmed privacy advocates.
Don Bell, policy counsel for the Constitution Project at the Government Oversight advocacy group, warned that the surveillance tools could allow ICE to circumvent privacy protections provided by the warrant process and the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
"This is likely unconstitutional," Bell told The Independent. "Normally, if law enforcement wants to seize your phone and get your location data, they need a warrant, but because the law hasn't caught up with technology, there's a loophole that effectively allows law enforcement to buy location data, which is confidential, without first obtaining a warrant."
In a redacted procurement document obtained by the technology news site 404 Media, the U.S. immigration agency proposes a contract to purchase "all-in-one" tools from PenLink that would allow agents to "compile, process, and verify billions of daily location signals from hundreds of millions of mobile devices." The document also mentions payments for services including "facial recognition," "advanced person search," and "dark web data stream."
"The Biden administration halted DHS's purchase of location data after the Inspector General found that DHS had broken the law," said Senator Ron Wyden. "Every American should be concerned that Trump's hand-picked security forces are once again buying and using location data without a warrant."
One of the products, Tangles, "automatically collects historical data from multiple communication channels, mobile forensics, internet communications, location data, financial records, and web intelligence data," according to procurement records obtained by Forbes.
The company that originally created Tangles, Cobwebs, was founded by a former member of elite Israeli cyber-intelligence agencies and was reportedly banned from Meta in 2021 after it was allegedly exposed using Facebook and WhatsApp accounts to spy on activists and opposition politicians in Hong Kong and Mexico. The company later merged with PenLink in 2023.
ICE documents also describe how the agency is testing a tool called Venntel, whose creators were accused by the Federal Trade Commission in 2024 of "illegally tracking and selling" sensitive location data, including information about mobile users' visits to health-related locations and places of worship.
Reports of ICE's acquisition of these powerful tools reverse a trend under the Biden administration, when law enforcement's purchase of vast amounts of consumer data for surveillance came under scrutiny.
This momentum has shifted under a second Trump administration, which has pushed for vast new surveillance powers as part of its mass deportation campaign and an unprecedented infusion of funding into federal immigration enforcement, the publication writes.
The Trump administration has reportedly renewed a $2 million contract with Paragon Solutions (US) Inc., an Israeli-based spyware company whose products have been accused of facilitating surveillance of journalists and activists. The deal had previously been frozen to review whether it complied with the Biden administration's March 2023 executive order restricting the use of commercial spyware that could pose a counterintelligence threat to the U.S. or that could be improperly used by a foreign government, WIRED reports.
Paragon's zero-click program, Graphite, can stealthily infiltrate its target's mobile phone and extract its contents, even from encrypted applications, the publication states.
Under Trump, ICE also entered into agreements with other government agencies to access highly sensitive data, including from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Medicaid.
Bell, a lawyer with the Constitution Project, warned that the combination of recent breakthroughs in computer technology and artificial intelligence, ICE's massive expansion of surveillance and data access, and the Trump administration's willingness to label ideological opponents and protesters as domestic terrorist threats could pave the way for arbitrary and alarming actions by federal agents.
"This seems to be part of a much broader pattern of ICE trying to collect everything it can," he said. "Even if it means collecting information about Americans that is different from their stated goal, and that becomes even more alarming and dangerous because it seems this administration is also redefining what it means to be in opposition."
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