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ICE PLANNING $100 MILLION ‘NIGHTMARE’ DOMESTIC SPY PROGRAM  
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Whitney Curry Wimbish
October 14, 2026
The American Prospect
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_ Under ERO ONE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to hire
142 intelligence contractors with top secret clearances and deploy
them in cities across the country. _

, Douglas Rissing/iStock

 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is fast-tracking a $100 million
domestic surveillance program to put 142 intelligence agents in more
than two dozen cities and the District of Columbia, in what
contracting and surveillance experts said would be a significant
expansion of the agency’s ability to reach into private lives.

The new program is called the Enforcement and Removal Operations
Overwatch and National Security Enforcement, or ERO ONE, described in
documents posted last month on federal procurement websites.

Under the program, agents would analyze classified and unclassified
information to identify “trends, patterns, relationships, threats,
and intelligence gaps,” and provide ICE with briefings for
Enforcement and Removal Operation missions, according to a statement
of work published on September 18
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A forecasting document published a week earlier
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solicitation will likely be released on December 10. Intelligence
contracting experts said the timeline suggests ICE will award the
contract around February.

“It looks dangerously like the construction of an internal spying
agency,” said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the American
Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, who
has written extensively [[link removed]] on
immigration agencies’ mass surveillance. “It’s a nightmare in
the making.”

It’s also a weapon that the government will likely use against not
only undocumented immigrants, but everyone else, too. That includes
political enemies, intelligence experts said. Speaking with the
_Prospect_ on Monday as news broke that the Trump regime had raided
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progressive Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar’s D.C. home, former military
intelligence analyst Michael Wriston said that “you’d expect to
see more of this” under ERO ONE.

“Not just necessarily sitting members of Congress, but anyone, and
especially members of the immigrant community,” Wriston said. “No
one is safe. No one.”

THE PLAN DOES NOT SPECIFY WHAT OR WHOM ICE is looking for with this
increased spying capability. But one of the components that caused
former intelligence contractors’ concern was that ERO ONE agents
will analyze both classified and nonclassified information to produce
“network, link and relationship” analyses. That type of analysis
involves researching not only a target, but also every other person to
whom they’re connected, including household members, family members,
friends, acquaintances, or the person with whom they carpool to work.

According to the statement of work, contractors will be tasked with
conducting analytical research “to identify and assess relationships
among individuals, organizations, locations, events, activities, data
points, and other entities.” They will review information to
identify “known, reported, or potential relationships; recurring
patterns; organizational structures; associations; areas of
convergence; temporal or geographic connections; and other linkages
relevant to the assigned intelligence requirement.” Contractors will
then “evaluate the significance and reliability” of the
relationships and “prepare link charts, network diagrams, timelines,
analytical summaries, written assessments, or other related
products” for ICE to use.

Military intelligence agents compile the same type of research,
Wriston said. He knows because he did that job.

“We’ve seen this time and time again. It’s the imperial
boomerang,” said Wriston, who is also a data journalist and the
founder of ICE watchdog group Project Salt Box
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the day the first document went live and has written
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about it since. “These are the kinds of things that happened in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, for years. Now that methodology is
being brought into the ICE space.”

Federal documents likewise do not detail the specific sources of
information agents will analyze, only that all agents must possess
previously awarded active top secret clearance, with eligibility to
access Sensitive Compartmented Information. That’s a type of
information that must be accessed through certain formal control
systems managed by the Director of National Intelligence, a position
held by Trump ally Jay Clayton. The agents will not make any decisions
about what to do with the information they compile.

Wriston said that except for the fact that ICE officials are trying to
make immigration a matter of national security, it’s unclear why
they need this program when they already have the Homeland Security
Investigations unit, which conducted the raid on Omar’s house, to
research targets. His immediate worry, he said, is that the program
will make it easier for the government to find terrified immigrants
hiding at home because they think they’ll be safe there.

ICE PLANS TO SEND THE 142 AGENTS, plus two project managers, to
locations in Atlanta, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Dallas, D.C., Denver,
Detroit, El Paso, Harlingen (Texas), Houston, Laguna Niguel
(California), Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York, Newark,
Philadelphia, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, San Diego, San
Francisco, Seattle, St. Paul, and Williston (Vermont), according to
the statement of work.

Details in the document, and the rapid timeline, show that the Trump
administration intends to use the program immediately, said Brian
Murphy, a government contractor who worked for 25 years with ICE
parent agency DHS. It’s rare for the government to only want workers
with top secret clearance, he said.

“I’ve only seen it when there is an imminent need to work on
something right now,” he told the _Prospect_. “Trump has two years
in office. He can’t wait … they want to get rolling on this
immediately.”

The program description is so broad that Murphy said he thinks the
goal goes beyond targeting immigrants. “I think it’s darker than
that,” because the agency could use the intelligence to attack
people with identities and views the Trump regime doesn’t like.
“The question for DHS is, what is the threat they’re trying to go
after?”

The federal government can easily change who qualifies as a threat and
produce data that backs up the reasoning, Murphy said, and used as an
example annual Homeland Threat Assessments. In 2020, Secretary of
Homeland Security Chad Wolf identified
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white supremacist extremists as “the most persistent and lethal
threat in the Homeland.” But by last year, that threat had
disappeared from the report
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except to appear once in a glossary of terms. The rest of the report
focused heavily on Trump administration priorities as national
security threats, including immigrants crossing the border with Mexico
and transnational criminal organizations.

In addition, the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti have shown how
the government views protesters against ICE abductions as an abiding
threat. In a national security directive known as NSPM-7, President
Trump identified anti-fascist protesters as domestic terrorists and
proposed an architecture to disrupt and counter dissent.

“If you want to draw a narrative that the real threat to America is
whatever you want it to be, you can very easily do that. You just stop
gathering intel on militias,” Murphy said. “It’s like any other
police state. If you ask it to find something to make my opponents the
enemy, well, you can do that.”

Legal liability should be a major concern for anyone who bids on the
ERO ONE contract, Murphy said, because it’s unclear whether the
information they’d be charged with accessing had been gathered
legally. He added, “It’s very, very concerning that they’re
fast-tracking this.”

Stanley, the ACLU analyst, noted that immigration officials across
agencies have been using an excessive amount of surveillance tools for
years, including their “Stingray” cell tower simulators
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automatic license plate readers, and tools that track location from
cellphones
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They use a facial recognition and biometric collection app called
Mobile Fortify, a Palantir app called ImmigrationOS to track
immigrants’ movements
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and buy data from LexisNexis to identify someone’s family and work
history
[[link removed]].
ERO ONE would draw on all of that information, plus an expanded group
of sources to reach into the private lives of anyone it wants,
intelligence experts said.

ICE already knows its potential bidders for ERO ONE, said Diana Brozi,
the procurement specialist listed on the document. She told the
_Prospect_ it was unlikely the agency would hold an industry day and
declined to provide further information.

DHS did not respond to a request for information or comment on the
claim that the program could be used to spy on political enemies.

_WHITNEY CURRY WIMBISH is a staff writer at The American Prospect. She
previously worked in the Financial Times newsletters division, The
Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and the Herald News in New Jersey. Her
work has been published in multiple outlets, including The New York
Times, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, Music & Literature,
North American Review, Sentient, Semafor, and elsewhere. She is a
coauthor of The Majority Report’s daily newsletter and publishes
short fiction in a range of literary magazines. She can be reached on
Signal at wwimbish.07._

* ICE
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* Domestic Spying
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* undocumented immigrants
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* political enemies
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