US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is seeking contractors to trawl social media and other open-source data for potential immigration enforcement leads, assuming public posts can yield actionable intelligence.
A contract opportunity published on Thursday by ICE states that the Homeland Security component is seeking about 30 contractors to perform investigations and analysis of open-source intelligence from the web, which solicitation documents suggest will largely focus on social media platforms.
“The Contractor will use a wide range of information sources including publicly available internet-based social media platforms,” ICE said. Commercial and law enforcement databases, as well as deep web and darknet data sources, are also in scope for the chosen contractor and their team, but social media appears to be the big one for American immigration cops.
“Previous approaches to targeting individuals for enforcement action which have not incorporated open web sources and social media information, have had limited success,” ICE continued. “The individuals targeted for enforcement action purposely employ countermeasures to inhibit ICE’s ability to locate them.”
In other words, people in a country illegally tend to keep their heads down so as not to attract attention. Why ICE believes illegal immigrants who intentionally obfuscate their digital trails would freely broadcast the information they’re looking for on social media isn’t clear, and the agency didn’t respond to questions for this story.
One thing’s for sure – whoever is drawing up solicitation documents for the contract isn’t exactly up on the state of social media.
Solicitation documents included with the contracting opportunity include mention of such popular social media sites as Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, X, Reddit, and the like, but also mention the need for investigators to trawl Google+ to look for leads.
For those operating under ICE’s understanding of the social media landscape, we regret to inform you that Google+ shut down six years ago. For those being charitable to ICE and assuming they may have been thinking of Plus’ replacement, Currents, that shut down in 2023, too.
This isn’t the first time that ICE has sought to monitor social media for what it views as malfeasance, but its previous effort sought to suppress dissent instead of just identifying those in the country illegally.
ICE released a solicitation back in November of 2024 seeking contractors to develop a system to scan social media and provide “analysis of behavioral and social media sentiment” toward ICE operations.
The October 2 request contains no indication that ICE is looking for anything beyond enforcement leads, but, given its prior attempt to police free speech on public platforms, we question whether other users may be caught up in ICE’s online dragnet.
It’s been reported that ICE has deported both US citizens and legal residents since the Trump administration took office.
ICE has also faced criticism after Apple, acting on a request from the Trump administration and the DOJ, removed an app that let users track ICE activity and receive alerts when raids might be nearby. Meanwhile, ICE reactivated a spyware contract with Israel-founded Paragon Solutions after a Biden-era compliance review temporarily paused it.
Democratic elected officials have also expressed concern about the free-speech chilling use of mobile facial recognition software by ICE, which they believe has been used against US citizens protesting ICE’s Trump-blessed mass deportation efforts around the US.
If ICE decides to formalize its team of social media snoops, the program could run until 2031, during which period the contractors will operate out of ICE facilities in Vermont and California. ®
