Image from ICE Rolls Facial Recognition Tools Out.
This page is part of a resource collection on Authoritarianism & Bigotry in the Second Trump Administration.
News: 2025
April 8. Andrew Duehren: Top I.R.S. Officials Said to Resign After Deal to Give ICE Migrants’ Data: The agreement is a major departure from the Internal Revenue Service’s previous stance encouraging migrants to file their taxes.
April 18. Caroline Haskins: ICE Is Paying Palantir $30 Million to Build ‘ImmigrationOS’ Surveillance Platform.
May 9. Caroline Haskins: US Customs and Border Protection Plans to Photograph Everyone Exiting the US by Car.
May 29. Dhruv Mehrotra: The US Is Storing Migrant Children’s DNA in a Criminal Database:Customs and Border Protection has swabbed the DNA of migrant children as young as 4, whose genetic data is uploaded to an FBI-run database that can track them if they commit crimes in the future.
June 26. Joseph Cox: ICE Is Using a New Facial Recognition App to Identify People, Leaked
June 28. Wired Magazine: ICE Rolls Facial Recognition Tools Out to Officers’ Phones.
July 9. Joseph Cox: ICE Is Searching a Massive Insurance and Medical Bill Database to Find
July 15. ProPublica: The IRS Is Building a Vast System to Share Millions of Taxpayers’ Data With ICE.
July 24. Douglas MacMillan & Silvia Foster-Frau: ICE moves to shackle some 180,000 immigrants with GPS ankle monitors: A June 9 memo directed ICE field officers to significantly expand the number of immigrants under round-the-clock surveillance.
August 20. Matt Burgess: Phone Searches at the US Border Hit a Record High.
September 10. Jack Poulson: ICE reactivated its $2 million contract with Israeli spyware firm Paragon.
September 22. Johana Bhuiyan: Documents offer rare insight on Ice’s close relationship with Palantir.
September 23. Joseph Cox: CBP Flew Drones to Help ICE 50 Times in Last Year.
September 25. Joseph Cox: How Surveillance Firms Use ‘Democracy’ As a Cover for Serving ICE and Trump.
September 30. Joseph Cox: ICE to Buy Tool that Tracks Locations of Hundreds of Millions of Phones Every Day.
October 3. Dell Cameron: ICE Wants to Build Out a 24/7 Social Media Surveillance Team.
October 16. Joseph Cox: ICE, Secret Service, Navy All Had Access to Flock’s Nationwide Network of Cameras.
October 25. Katya Schwenk: ICE Just Spent Millions on a Social Media Surveillance AI Program: The digital surveillance software, known as Zignal Labs, is also used by the Israeli military and the Pentagon.
October 29. Joseph Cox: ICE and CBP Agents Are Scanning Peoples’ Faces on the Street To Verify Citizenship.
October 31. Joseph Cox: You Can’t Refuse To Be Scanned by ICE’s Facial Recognition App, DHS Document Says.
October 31. Sam Biddle: ICE Plans Cash Rewards for Private Bounty Hunters to Locate and Track Immigrants.
November 2. Ralph Thomassaint Joseph & Paz Radovic: This $470 Million Surveillance Program Is Watching Immigrants Across the US: There are no established standards for how long immigrants can be monitored or what data ICE can collect or share.
November 8. Jude Joffe-Block: Immigration agents have new technology to identify and track people.
November 12. Joseph Cox: ICE Plans to Spend $180 Million on Bounty Hunters to Stalk Immigrants.
November 17. Joseph Cox: This App Lets ICE Track Vehicles and Owners Across the Country.
November 18. Jason Koebler: Two Weeks of Surveillance Footage From ICE Detention Center ‘Irretrievably Destroyed.’
November 18. Joseph Cox: Contractor Recruiting People on LinkedIn to Physically Track Immigrants for ICE, Will Pay $300.
December 5. Joseph Cox: DHS’s Immigrant-Hunting App Removed from Google Play Store.
December 9. Joseph Cox & Jason Koebler: Border Patrol Agent Recorded Raid with Meta’s Ray-Ban Smart Glasses.
December 13. Joseph Cox & Ashley Cleek: How a US Citizen Was Scanned With ICE’s Facial Recognition Tech: Jesus Gutiérrez told immigration agents he was a U.S. citizen. Only after they scanned his face, did the agents let him go.