Donald Trump’s administration plans to spend $100 million on a fleet of intelligence analysts for a previously unreported Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit designed to radically expand the agency’s espionage and surveillance work.
ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, the division responsible for arresting and deporting tens of thousands of people from the country, could hire more than 140 intelligence officers and project managers with “top secret” clearances for an “Overwatch and National Security Enforcement” unit embedded in field offices across the country.
According to the government’s request for information, ICE is expecting to hire government contractors to review data from “classified and unclassified sources.”
Those “Intelligence Research Specialists” will then compile reports on their targets and others “to identify significant changes in activity, recurring patterns, emerging relationships, network activity, potential threat indicators, and other developments relevant to assigned intelligence requirements.”
Agents will also perform “analytical research” to “identify and assess relationships among individuals, organizations, locations, events, activities, data points and other entities” to support ICE arrests, according to government filings.
The $100 million plan follows a massive injection in federal funding for the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts, a government-wide project that now has tens of billions of dollars over the next several years to recruit and hire ICE agents and expand its detention capacity.
ICE already spends millions of dollars buying up data that it uses for intelligence collection, including pulling from cell phone data and surveillance software to track down and arrest immigrants and monitor American citizens who have criticized the agency.
The agency also has deployed facial recognition technology, license plate readers, drones and other technology to boost arrests. Earlier this year, ICE also proposed spending up to $180 million on “skip tracing services” from bounty hunters, bail bondsmen, debt collectors, repossession agents and other private investigators to track people down.
Under the proposal for “Overwatch and National Security Enforcement” personnel, roughly three to five analysts would be deployed to 27 cities, including New York City, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Miami and San Francisco, among others, along with a project manager based in Washington, D.C.
Those analysts would be expected to hold active “top secret” government clearances and possess extensive professional intelligence experience.
The analysts would be explicitly prohibited from making arrests.
ICE says it launched the Overwatch program “due to the exponential increase of threats and violence against personnel.”
“ICE protects America through criminal investigations and enforcing immigration laws to preserve national security and public safety and employs technology and intelligence techniques to identify, locate and arrest national security and public safety threats,” a spokesperson for ICE told The Independent.
“ICE and its partners need to stay ahead of criminals and terrorists, which evolve just as rapidly as the technology they use to support their criminal activities,” the person added.
The agency is now relying on what it calls an “intelligence-driven approach” to prevent “future attacks through comprehensive intelligence collection and analysis.”
The proposal comes just weeks after federal court filings provided a rare glimpse into ICE’s surveillance operations, after the agency was forced to reveal how agents spied on a Minneapolis church despite a court order that called the potential consequences of such an operation “profoundly troubling.”
Documents revealed that undercover ICE officers spied on people who attended church meetings and ran license plate numbers of worshippers’ cars, part of a recently unveiled surveillance campaign that sought to crack down on protests after a surge of federal agents in Minneapolis earlier this year.
Massachusetts Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV blocked the Trump administration’s policy giving agents permission to make arrests inside places of worship earlier this year. Last month, the judge sided with church groups who successfully sued the government and agreed to hold a hearing to determine why ICE should not be held in contempt for violating his ruling.
ICE’s hiring streak has come under renewed scrutiny in the wake of a recent whistleblower report from an anonymous ICE official who was previously tasked with evaluating new recruits.
The official, who no longer works at the agency, warned that the Trump administration’s fast-tracked hiring process exposed the U.S. to “grave national security risks,” The Independent previously reported.
The report follows other urgent warnings from current and former officials who feared that the Trump administration’s hiring surge put thousands of officers on the streets without proper guidance or training.
The latest complaint, filed by a 17-year ICE veteran, alleges the agency was relying on an “unprecedented lowering of standards” to onboard “improperly vetted” candidates who were receiving job offers before they passed any background checks.
The official, who directly oversaw more than 100 employees and evaluated thousands of ICE applicants, was so alarmed by the process that he filed a complaint with the Office of Inspector General in the Department of Homeland Security.
That report follows a similar whistleblower complaint from now-former ICE lawyer Ryan Schwank, who served as an assistant chief counsel and later as a legal instructor at the ICE Academy at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center.
The academy was “teaching cadets to violate the Constitution, and they were attempting to cloak it in secrecy,” he said earlier this year.
