(New York) The American federal immigration police (ICE), deployed by Donald Trump throughout the country, has colossal financial resources and spends tens of millions of dollars on the purchase of weapons, ammunition, bulletproof vests and surveillance technologies, according to accounting documents consulted by AFP.
This spending on arms and technology is much higher than it was under the Biden presidency or during the first term of Donald Trump.
ICE, which its detractors accuse of turning into a paramilitary force, has been given the mission of deporting an unprecedented number of irregular migrants on American soil and is spending lavishly to achieve this.
Since Trump returned to the White House on January 20, ICE has placed more than $70 million in orders in the “small arms, ammunition and accessories manufacturing” category.
For comparison, between January 20 and October 20, 2024, the agency had spent $9.7 million in this same category, according to the same official documents.
In September alone, ICE ordered $10 million worth of guns and magazines from Quantico Tactical Incorporated and $9 million worth of rifles and accessories from automatic weapons maker Geissele Automatics.
The agency also purchased more than $10 million worth of body armor, holsters and related equipment during the same month.
These massive hardware purchases are accompanied by a spending spree on surveillance software, according to documents consulted by AFP.
So in September, ICE spent $3.75 million on software and related services from facial recognition company Clearview AI.
Since the start of Trump’s second term, the federal agency has also purchased products from Magnet Forensics and Cellebrite, two companies that make cellphone data extraction software, as well as products from Penlink, which provides location data from hundreds of millions of phones.
Added to this is a $30 million contract with Palantir to develop “Immigration OS”, an all-in-one platform intended to target irregular migrants and identify those in the process of voluntary return to their country of origin.
At the same time, ICE reactivated a two million dollar contract with Paragon, an Israeli spyware supplier.
This contract was suspended under the Biden administration, after a 2023 executive order prohibiting the purchase of spyware presenting risks to national security.
24 hour monitoring
Beyond the contracts already signed, the agency has launched calls for tenders to strengthen its monitoring of social networks.
A call for tenders, published in early October, is looking for service providers capable of creating a social media monitoring center, with nearly 30 analysts operating 24 hours a day, to “collect crucial and specific information in real time” on individuals from data shared online.
While surveillance operations play an important role in policing, human rights advocates have long worried about the scale of data collected in the age of social media.
“Large-scale surveillance of social media threatens free speech,” says technology expert Cooper Quintin.
“If people know that ICE monitors social media, looking for anyone expressing any form of attachment to their country of origin, that will dissuade many from speaking out publicly,” the expert told AFP.
The ability to purchase data through third parties also allows agencies to surveil large numbers of people without a court warrant, he noted.
ICE did not respond to requests from AFP.
Budget explosion
All of these purchases were made possible by a massive budget package passed by the Republican-controlled Congress.
The budget adopted in July allocated ICE an operating budget of $75 billion over four years, or $18.8 billion per year on average.
That’s almost double the $9.6 billion fiscal year 2024 budget.
While other government agencies are slowing down due to the partial government shutdown, ICE and its parent department, Homeland Security, are largely unaffected.
