Here’s the tech powering ICE’s deportation crackdown Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai Zack Whittaker 1:00 PM PST · January 26, 2026 President Donald Trump said he would make countering immigration one of his flagship policies during his second term in the White House, promising an unprecedented number of deportations.
A year in, data shows that deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection have surpassed at least 350,000 people .
ICE has taken center stage in Trump’s mass removal campaign, raiding homes, workplaces, and public parks in search of undocumented people, prompting widespread protests and resistance from communities across the United States.
ICE uses several technologies to identify and surveil individuals. Homeland Security has also leveraged the shadow of Trump’s deportations to challenge long-standing legal norms, including forcibly entering homes to arrest people without a judicial warrant, a move that legal experts say violates the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Here are some of the technologies that ICE is relying on.
ICE has a technology known as cell-site simulators to snoop on cellphones. These surveillance devices, as the name suggests, are designed to appear as a cellphone tower, tricking nearby phones into connecting to them. Once that happens, the law enforcement authorities who are using the cell-site simulators can locate and identify the phones in their vicinity, and potentially intercept calls, text messages, and internet traffic.
Cell-site simulators are also known as “stingrays,” based on the brand name of one of the earliest versions of the technology, which was made by U.S. defense contractor Harris (now L3Harris); or IMSI catchers , a technology that can capture a nearby cell phone’s unique identifier, which law enforcement can use for identifying the phone’s owner.
In the last two years, ICE has signed contracts for more than $1.5 million with a company called TechOps Specialty Vehicles (TOSV) , which produces customized vans for law enforcement.
A contract worth more than $800,000, dated May 8, 2025, said TOSV will provide “Cell Site Simulator (CSS) Vehicles to support the Homeland Security Technical Operations program.”
TOSV president Jon Brianas told TechCrunch that the company does not manufacture the cell-site simulators, but rather integrates them “into our overall design of the vehicle.”
Cell-site simulators have long been controversial for several reasons.
These devices are designed to trick all nearby phones to connect to them, which means that, by design, they gather the data of many innocent people. Also, authorities have sometimes deployed them without first obtaining a warrant.
Authorities have also tried to keep their use of the technology secret in court, withholding information and even accepting plea deals and dropping cases rather than disclose information about their use of cell-site simulators. In a court case in 2019 in Baltimore, it was revealed that prosecutors were instructed to drop cases rather than violate a non-disclosure agreement with the company that makes the devices.
Clearview AI is perhaps the most well-known facial-recognition company today. For years, the company promised to be able to identify any face by searching through a large database of photos it had scraped from the internet.
On Monday, 404 Media reported that ICE has signed a contract with the company to support its law enforcement arm, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), “with capabilities of identifying victims and offenders in child sexual exploitation cases and assaults against law enforcement officers.”
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