Fight for the Future, EFF, Others Push Back Against Growing ICE Surveillance
Digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future is joining with almost four dozen other organizations in urging Congress to defund ICE in the wake of the high-profile fatal shooting of a Minneapolis woman earlier this month and a range of other alle
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Digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future is joining with almost four dozen other organizations in urging Congress to defund ICE in the wake of the high-profile fatal shooting of a Minneapolis woman earlier this month and a range of other alleged abuses and amid concerns about the agency’s growing use of surveillance technologies.It comes as efforts to abolish or defund the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency are gaining momentum among some Democratic lawmakers and organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation continue to highlight the widening reach of ICE’s surveillance capabilities, with the EFF writing earlier this month that “while the NSA and FBI might be the first agencies that come to mind when thinking about surveillance in the U.S., ICE should not be discounted.”In a letter sent to members of Congress and posted this week online, Fight for the Future and 43 others – a collection of anti-surveillance organizations, privacy rights groups, civil and immigration rights activists, and community organizations – are urging legislators to block funding for the Department of Homeland Security, including the money being spent by ICE for surveillance technologies.Others signing onto the letter include the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP) and the Yale Law School’s Privacy Lab.Supercharging SurveillanceThe groups argue that “a major part of the $170 billion in funding that ICE has received from the Trump Administration is being leveraged to supercharge ICE violence and intimidation using surveillance tech.”That includes reports that ICE is using technologies like Palantir’s Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) tool to pull in individuals’ addresses from the U.S. Department of Health – which includes Medicaid – and other sources to develop maps for ICE agents of potential deportation targets, and Amazon Ring partnerships with Axon Enterprise and Flock Security to share footage from the doorbell cameras with those vendors’ software, which are used in crime investigations.Other concerns include ICE’s use of technologies that can surveil phones in areas, facial recognition software, and AI-powered drones.“The best thing that Congress can do to protect targeted communities is to block any DHS funding bill that includes money for ICE,” the organizations wrote. “The second best thing Congress can do is to severely restrict what ICE can spend money on, including a complete moratorium on the purchase and use of surveillance tech.”Lawmakers Make Their ArgumentSome Democratic lawmakers are already pushing bills to reverse a significant jump in spending – to $170 billion over four years for border and other enforcement – under a President Trump’s budget bill that was passed by a Republican-controlled Congress. ICE’s cut of that is $75 billion through 2029, including $28.7 billion this year.The Trump Administration has granted ICE and its related agency, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), wide latitude in how they operate, despite polling that indicates public support for those operations waning.For privacy and other groups, the worry is focused on the growing surveillance capabilities in ICE’s hands, with the EFF writing that “with a budget for 2025 that is 10 times the size of the agency’s total surveillance spending over the last 13 years, ICE is going on a shopping spree, creating one of the largest, most comprehensive domestic surveillance machines in history.”It pointed to ICE last year agreeing to an $11 million contract to buy Cellebrite devices that enable users to break into locked phones that they seize, and a $3 million contract with Cellebrite competitor Magnet Forensics, whose Graykey tool has similar capabilities. The agency also has a $2 million contract with Paragon, which makes the Graphite spyware that can secretly grab messages from various encrypted chat apps like WhatsApp and Signal without users knowing.In addition, ICE is spending $5 million for surveillance tools from PenLink, a company whose products include Webloc, for capturing the locations of phones, and Tangles, which provides access to social media APIs and web-scraping capabilities. It adds to money ICE has spent on other social media scanning and AI analysis technology, according to EFF.Expanding ConcernEFF worries that with all this technology, ICE’s use of it may expand.“Our concern with ICE buying this software is the likelihood that it will be used against undocumented people and immigrants who are here legally, as well as U.S. citizens who have spoken up against ICE or who work with immigrant communities,” the organization wrote. “Malware such as Graphite can be used to read encrypted messages as they are sent, other forms of spyware can also download files, photos, location history, record phone calls, and even discretely turn on your microphone to record you.”
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