Immigration agents have new technology to identify and track people

Source: NPR

November 8, 2025 5:00 AM ET


Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is acquiring powerful new surveillance tools to identify and monitor people. They include apps that let federal agents point a cell phone at someone's face to potentially identify them and determine their immigration status in the field, and another that can scan irises.

Newly licensed software can give "access to vast amounts of location-based data," according to an archive of the website of the company that developed it, and ICE recently revived a previously frozen contract with a company that makes spyware that can hack into cell phones. The federal agency is also ramping up its social media surveillance, with new AI-driven software contracts, and is considering hiring 24/7 teams of contractors assigned to scouring various databases and platforms like Facebook and TikTok and creating dossiers on users.

The Trump administration is seeking to employ new technology as it tries to boost deportations to a million a year, a target that could be helped with tech to identify and locate noncitizens subject to removal.

Some Democratic members of Congress are raising legal concerns about the new technologies and are asking questions of ICE that are going unanswered. A group of U.S. senators have called on ICE to stop using a mobile facial recognition app. "Americans have a right to walk through public spaces without being surveilled," Democratic Sen. Edward Markey of Mass. told NPR.

Read more: https://www.npr.org/2025/11/08/nx-s1-5585691/ice-facial-recognition-immigration-tracking-spyware