Immigration and Customs Enforcement is reportedly seeking to buy access to a powerful suite of highly controversial surveillance tools that will allow the agency to monitor people’s locations based on data from hundreds of millions of mobile phones.
The move, which comes after immigration agencies scaled back the use of such data under the Biden administration, has alarmed privacy advocates.
Don Bell, policy counsel at the Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight, an advocacy group, warned that the surveillance tools could let ICE get around the privacy protections of the warrant process and the Fourth Amendment.
“This is probably unconstitutional,” Bell told The Independent. “Usually, if law enforcement wants to take your phone, and is interested in getting your location data, they would need a warrant, but because the law has not kept up with technology, there is this loophole that effectively has allowed law enforcement to purchase location data, which is highly sensitive, without getting a warrant first.”
In a redacted acquisition document obtained by the tech news site 404 Media, the immigration agency proposes entering into a contract to buy “all-in-one” tools from a company called PenLink that will allow agents to “compile, process, and validate billions of daily location signals from hundreds of millions of mobile devices.” The document also mentions payments for services involving “face detection,” “advanced face search,” and a “dark web data feed.”
“The Biden Administration shut down DHS’s location data purchases after an inspector general found that DHS had broken the law,” Senator Ron Wyden told the outlet. “Every American should be concerned that Trump’s hand-picked security force is once again buying and using location data without a warrant.”
The Independent has contacted ICE and PenLink for comment.
One of the products, Tangles, “automatically ingests historical data from multiple communication channels, mobile forensics, internet-based communications, location data, financial records and web intelligence,” according to procurement records obtained by Forbes.
The company that originally created Tangles, Cobwebs, was founded by a former member of Israel’s elite cyber intelligence agencies, and it was reportedly kicked off Meta in 2021 after allegedly being found using Facebook and WhatsApp accounts to snoop on activists and opposition politicians in Hong Kong and Mexico. The company later merged with PenLink in 2023.
The ICE documents also describe the agency testing out a tool called Venntel, whose creators the Federal Trade Commission in 2024 accused of “unlawfully tracking and selling” sensitive location data, including information about mobile users’ visits to health-related locations and places of worship.
ICE’s reported purchase of these high-powered tools reverses the trend from the Biden administration, when law enforcement’s purchasing of mass amounts of consumer data for surveillance came under heavy scrutiny.
A 2023 report from the Department of Homeland Security inspector general found that ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and DHS failed to follow internal privacy guidelines and federal law in their use of such location data.
That same year, CBP said it would stop using commercially sourced smartphone location data, and ICE did the same by early 2024. By April of that year, the House of Representatives passed the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, which would ban the government from buying Americans’ data from data brokers it they would otherwise need a warrant to obtain it.
That momentum has reversed under the second Trump administration, which has pushed to obtain vast new surveillance powers as part of its overall mass deportation campaign and infusion of unprecedented funding into federal immigration enforcement.
The Trump administration has reportedly restarted a $2 million contract with Paragon Solutions (US) Inc., a spyware company founded in Israel whose products have been accused of facilitating the surveillance of journalists and activists. The deal had previously been frozen to review whether it complied with a March 2023 Biden administration executive order limiting the use of commercial spyware that could pose counterintelligence risks to the U.S. or that might be improperly used by a foreign government, WIRED reported.
Paragon’s “zero-click” Graphite program can quietly invade the mobile phone of its target and extract its contents, even from encrypted apps.
Under Trump, ICE has also struck agreements with fellow government agencies to access highly sensitive data, including from the Internal Revenue Service and Medicaid.
Bell, the Constitution Project attorney, warned that the combination of recent leaps in computer and AI power, ICE’s mass expansion of surveillance and data access, and the Trump administration’s willingness to brand ideological opponents and protesters as domestic terror threats could pave the way to arbitrary and concerning action from federal agents.
“This seems to be part of a much larger pattern of ICE trying to collect anything and everything it can,” he said. “Even if that means scooping up information on Americans, which is different from their purported goal, and it is made all the more concerning and dangerous because it seems like this administration is also redefining what it means to be in opposition.”
