Technology has played a key role in the increase in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity since the inauguration of President Donald Trump.
Technology companies provide cloud infrastructure, databases, surveillance, and spyware, as well as talent acquisition services, to the controversial government agency, leading to upset from liberal politicians, civil rights organizations, and even the technology companies’ own employees.
ICE was established alongside the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2002, as part of the Homeland Security Act. Today, its budget is over $8 billion per year. Since then, its methods of immigration enforcement have faced vocal opposition.
“I think they’re overstepping their legal authority for sure, and their methods are definitely inhumane. It’s an infringement on individual rights,” said Carlmont senior Akhil Pillai.
Additionally, many have protested the increased deployment of ICE under both Trump administrations.
“What ICE is doing is absurd, racist, and illegal. It targets people not because of some sort of rational, crime-enforcement basis, but because of the color of their skin and the language that they speak. In truth, American Latinos are an amazingly diverse group of people that have contributed so much to this country,” said Nico Fischer, a senior at Santa Clara High School.
This mass deployment of ICE is made possible by contemporary technology.
Technological infrastructure
Palantir, a data analysis company founded and led by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and Stephen Cohen, provides the central data infrastructure for ICE. With a recent $30 million contract from ICE, Palantir is developing ImmigrationOS to aggregate databases from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), local police departments, and other governmental organizations, targeting individuals for deportation, tracking “self-deportations,” and streamlining the process of identifying and removing undocumented immigrants.
This builds on the previous systems that Palantir provided to ICE, called Integrated Case Management (ICM) and Federal Alien Logistics Requirements for Operations Nationwide Search and Analysis (FALCON-SA), which merged different levels of law enforcement to profile immigrants. ICE’s opponents fear that Palantir, despite its assertion that it creates only “tools, not rules,” shapes immigration enforcement through its infrastructure’s priorities and methodology.
Amazon Web Services hosts biometric and personal data in the cloud for ICE and shares it with various law enforcement agencies, bolstering the foundation provided by Palantir. Immigrant advocates, such as the activist organization Mijente, refer to this infrastructure as the Cloud Industrial Complex.
Meanwhile, federal contracting records reviewed by WIRED show that ICE is expanding its surveillance centers in Vermont and California. To do so, it utilizes databases from LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters, as well as AI tools from ShadowDragon and Penlink.
It has also been linked to spyware and surveillance companies, such as Magnet Forensics and Paragon Solutions, an Israeli company, whose products can unlock and inspect phones, intercept messages from “secure” platforms like WhatsApp, and even turn unknowing phones into recording devices, according to the British news outlet The Guardian. Microsoft Azure and Clearview AI, a facial recognition software that has been banned in parts of Europe, have also signed on to provide services to ICE, according to The Brookings Institution.
One way that ICE is expanding surveillance is by monitoring social media for negative sentiment toward ICE, as well as potential undocumented immigrants.
“Meta and Apple squash a lot of information that protects immigrants. There was a story post on Instagram that said, ‘America loves immigrants,’ and every single time I saw that story, it warned me before watching that it had ‘sensitive content.’ That never happened before the second Trump administration and the expansion of ICE’s jurisdiction and funding. It occurred to me and several other people who were reposting that, ‘Look, if this is flagging you as sensitive content, Meta is literally tracking our stories,’ which is insane to think about,” said Ankita Jaikumar, a senior at Lambert High School.
Altogether, these tech companies combine into a network for mass surveillance and the targeting of individuals, citizen and noncitizen alike, based on political views or culture.
“There’s definitely an ethics and privacy issue. Palantir and other firms working with the government on recognition technology are a massive concern. Tesla having a large share of government vehicle purchases is dangerous, especially when Musk is known to just unlock an arbitrary vehicle at the request of local law enforcement,” Pillai said.
Additional enablement
At the same time as technology companies enable ICE’s operations on the backend, apps like Red Dot and ICEBlock, which track ICE raids, were removed from app stores by both Apple and Google.
While Apple did so at the request of US Attorney General Pam Bondi, Google claimed that the location tracking threatened the safety of a “vulnerable group,” referring to ICE agents.
Many saw the removal as suppressing community defense networks.
Similarly, some see the use of technology in modern immigration enforcement as an extension of past government targeting of marginalized groups.
“The US government has used technology to essentially spy on American Latinos in illegal ways before. Just this January, the CIA released more than 55 documents about their surveillance of the Latino Civil Rights movement in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. Most of these folks fighting for civil rights were Americans. The government would intercept mail, listen in on radio signals, and more,” Fischer said. “Similar things happened in my family’s homeland of Puerto Rico, where the FBI consistently spied on Puerto Rican independence activists. It’s because of that history that I think we should all be skeptical of the US government using new technologies against ‘foreign’ nationals, because when they’ve claimed to do that in the past, it’s often been American citizens — chiefly American Latinos — who they are actually acting against. And that is without saying that everyone, including undocumented migrants, deserves the right to basic privacy.”
The declassified documents referred to by Fischer revealed how federal agencies spied on Latino organizations such as the Brown Berets and Young Lords, treating them as a threat to national security to justify surveillance.
Predictive analytics using artificial intelligence (AI) and biometric data to profile individuals as dissenters and immigrants can be seen as a follow-up to the racial targeting that occurred in the mid-to-late 1900s, while shared cloud databases resemble the interagency files of that time; overall, both represent the erosion of privacy and local authority for racialized national agendas, according to The Nation.
Community response
In response, various organizations and individuals are attempting to build a movement in opposition to the technology companies that support ICE. #NoTechForICE, for example, encourages individuals and communities to educate themselves on personal alternatives and take direct action alongside students and technology workers to end the contracts these companies have with the government. If they can’t do the latter, it encourages them to sever ICE’s contracts with other organizations. Others seek stronger laws in privacy, AI oversight, and antitrust to prevent the growth of these technologies.
“Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is the controversial decision that reversed campaign finance restrictions and enables corporations to spend unlimited money on elections, so our lawmakers have sold out. They won’t break up unnatural monopolies or oligopolies. There’s barely anyone in this country who has not taken corporate lobbyist money. The first step for anyone who wants to fix this is to reverse the Citizens United ruling, because that set our country on a train wreck that we are only feeling now,” Jaikumar said.
Additionally, some have protested the political role of technology corporations through boycotts. Others have protested from within, leaking information about what the companies they work for are doing or threatening labor actions. Community members demand increased transparency.
“Transparency in relations between the public and private sectors is imperative. We need to do better,” Pillai said.
For example, when Salesforce pitched its potential use in mass hiring and aggressive marketing to ICE, the information was leaked and received backlash. It was seen as betraying the values of San Francisco, where Salesforce is based, and local politicians frowned upon the company’s support for an agency that oversteps sanctuary city ordinances and human rights.
“Is it understandable to me? Yes. Is it right? No, they should stand up. It’s not about the shareholders. The profit model drives the destruction of the individual,” Pillai said.
Maximus Kwan • Nov 5, 2025 at 9:17 pm
Unfortunately, the ICE’s collaboration with Palantir and other surveillance companies to monitor social media, as well as scan and store biometric data, should not be surprising, especially in light of the 2013 Edward Snowden revelations. Mass surveillance has existed ever since the 9/11 attacks, all in the name of national security, and persisted throughout Democratic and Republican administrations alike. This current ICE collaboration only marks an extension of these trends.
But it is also easy, all too easy, to succumb to hopelessness and fall into mind-numbing apathy. And what can we do in the face of such overwhelming force?
Surprisingly, we can do quite a lot. Certainly we can organize and fight for better privacy legislation. Still, we can also fight on a personal level against the Big Tech corporations that harvest all of our data and offer it on a platter to ICE. According to the United Nations, privacy is a human right[1]. I think that it is about time that we start treating it like one.
I do not have all the answers, but I suggest taking a look at Privacy Guides’ knowledge base. They have plenty of resources for people looking to improve their privacy, regardless of how slight their efforts might be. Start small and avoid overextending yourself. Anything helps in our day and age.
As Snowden once said, “Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”
[1] Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.