Image from ICE Rolls Facial Recognition Tools Out.
This page is part of a resource collection Tracking ICE During the Second Trump Administration.
Resources
404 Media: Doing some of the best reporting on corporate and government surveillance.
News: 2026
January 6. Joseph Cox: Here is the Agreement Giving ICE Medicaid Patients’ Data.
January 8. Joseph Cox: Inside ICE’s Tool to Monitor Phones in Entire Neighborhoods.
January 15. Joseph Cox: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid.
January 15. Joseph Cox: New Legislation Would Rein In ICE’s Facial Recognition App.
January 19. Joseph Cox: ICE’s Facial Recognition App Misidentified a Woman. Twice.
January 21. Dell Cameron: Surveillance and ICE Are Driving Patients Away From Medical Care.
January 27. Sanya Mansoor: How ICE is using facial recognition in Minnesota: Mobile Fortify app being used to scan faces of citizens and immigrants – but its use has prompted a severe backlash.
January 27. Aram Roston: FBI to investigate Minneapolis activists after far-right claim about Signal chats.
January 29. Jason Koebler: Senators Push for Answers on ICE’s Surveillance Shopping Spree.
January 30. Moustafa Bayoumi: ICE’s surveillance app is a techno-authoritarian nightmare.
January 30. Sheera Frenkel & Aaron Krolik: How ICE Already Knows Who Minneapolis Protesters Are: Agents use facial recognition, social media monitoring and other tech tools not only to identify undocumented immigrants but also to track protesters, current and former officials said.
January 30. Joseph Cox: Here is the User Guide for ELITE, the Tool Palantir Made for ICE.
February 3. Zack Whittaker: Homeland Security is trying to force tech companies to hand over data about Trump critics.
February 5. Dell Cameron & Maddy Varner: ICE and CBP’s Face-Recognition App Can’t Actually Verify Who People Are. ICE has used Mobile Fortify to identify immigrants and citizens alike over 100,000 times, by one estimate. It wasn’t built to work like that—and only got approved after DHS abandoned its own privacy rules.
February 6. Jason Koebler: Inspector General Investigating Whether ICE’s Surveillance Tech Breaks the Law.
February 10. Jason Koebler: With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet: Ring’s ‘Search Party’ is dystopian surveillance accelerationism.
February 10. Mark Keierleber: Local police aid ICE by tapping school cameras amid Trump’s immigration crackdown: Local police assisted federal immigration agents by repeatedly searching school cameras that record license plate numbers.
February 11. Jason Koebler: Government Loses Hard Drives It Was Supposed to Put ICE Detention Center Footage On.
February 12. Joseph Cox: Cops Are Buying ‘GeoSpy’, an AI That Geolocates Photos in Seconds.
February 13. Sheera Frenkel & Mike Isaac: Homeland Security Wants Social Media Sites to Expose Anti-ICE Accounts: The department has sent Google, Meta and other companies hundreds of subpoenas for information on accounts that track or comment on Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
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.
December 18. Joseph Cox: ICE Contracts Company Making Bounty Hunter AI Agents.