Who's Behind ICE? The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportations

Who's Behind ICE? The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportations is the October 2018 74-page report commissioned by Mijente, the National Immigration Project, and the Immigrant Defense Project, and researched by Empower LLC. It is the founding research artefact of the U.S. grassroots #NoTechForICE campaign — the campaign-and-hashtag launched alongside the report's release as Mijente's public-facing organising vehicle for the demand that Silicon Valley contractors end the federal contracts under which they supply data-broker, case-management, cloud, and surveillance infrastructure to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The report mapped the tech-and-data supply chain through which firms including Palantir, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Salesforce, LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, Northrop Grumman, Forensic Logic, and Vigilant Solutions had become operational partners in U.S. immigration enforcement, and supplied the substantive evidentiary base on which the campaign's subsequent multi-front organising programme was built. Within the make-AI-good corpus Who's Behind ICE? is the principal U.S. civil-society publication-side documentary artefact on the technology-and-data supply chain into U.S. immigration enforcement, the foundational documentary spine of the #NoTechForICE campaign, and the report whose framings — the federal-contracting "revolving door", the sanctuary-city data-sharing loophole, the "mission critical" status of Palantir's case-management systems to ICE — anchor the corpus's standing vocabulary on surveillance-tech accountability in the U.S. immigration-enforcement context.

Origin and context

The report was commissioned and researched in the eighteen months following the January 2017 Trump-administration executive orders that expanded U.S. immigration-enforcement priorities, ended Obama-era enforcement-discretion guidance, and made every undocumented person in the United States a deportation target. Mijente — the Phoenix-headquartered Latinx and Chicanx national organising hub whose immediate organisational precursor was the National Day Laborer Organizing Network's #Not1MoreDeportation campaign — partnered for the project with the National Immigration Project (NIP) of the National Lawyers Guild and the Immigrant Defense Project (IDP), the two principal U.S. legal-defence civil-society organisations representing immigrants facing deportation proceedings. The substantive research was contracted to Empower LLC, a U.S. research-and-strategy firm specialising in corporate-accountability investigations. The commissioning partnership reflected the report's working theory: that the post-2017 expansion of ICE's operational footprint depended at base on the technology infrastructure that Silicon Valley firms supplied through federal contracts, and that documenting that supply chain in detail was the precondition for any organising programme that could contest it.

The report's release on 23 October 2018 was paired with the launch of the #NoTechForICE campaign as Mijente's public-facing organising vehicle. The pairing was a deliberate design decision: the report was not published as a stand-alone research artefact for the policy-and-academic audience, but as the substantive ground on which an organising campaign with named corporate targets, a named coalition, and a named multi-front programme of demands could be built. The campaign's articulated five-point agenda — exposing tech's outsized role in law enforcement, educating communities, taking direct action, organising with tech workers and students, and targeting specific named contractors — operated as the public-facing translation of the report's findings into an organising programme.

Structure and content

The 74-page report's structure walked through the federal-contracting and data-broker supply chain into U.S. immigration enforcement in named-contractor sections rather than as a single integrated narrative. The substantive backbone is contractor-by-contractor mapping: each major named corporate participant in the ICE technology supply chain is documented through its specific contracting relationship with ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, or other federal immigration-enforcement agencies; the specific products and services supplied under each contract; the technical role those products play in ICE's enforcement operations; and the corporate-disclosure record around each contracting relationship. The report's headline findings — carried in the Mijente announcement post — name Amazon's 204 federal authorisations to host government data as more than any competitor, with Amazon Web Services hosting biometric data on 230 million unique identities through its federal-cloud contracts. The structural conclusion — that the technology industry's products and services are not incidental to but operationally constitutive of ICE's enforcement capacity at scale — supplies the campaign's substantive premise: that the same federal-contracting relationships that make modern ICE operationally possible are the lever on which the campaign's organising programme can press.

The tech-and-data supply chain

The report's substantive contribution is its mapping of the named corporate contractors in the U.S. immigration-enforcement supply chain. Palantir Technologies — the Peter-Thiel-co-founded data-analytics firm — supplies ICE with two principal systems: the Investigative Case Management (ICM) platform, described in U.S. government procurement documents as "mission critical" to ICE's investigations infrastructure, which allows ICE agents to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases to build profiles of immigrants; and the FALCON platform, the case-management tool used by agents leading workplace raids. The report documents Palantir's ICE-contracting work as the most legible single corporate anchor in the federal-immigration-enforcement supply chain — a finding that subsequently anchored the #NoTechForICE campaign's principal corporate-target focus on Palantir, and that has continued to organise the campaign's strategic posture through the 2025 award to Palantir of a $30 million contract to build ImmigrationOS, the comprehensive AI-driven surveillance and deportation-logistics platform that has reframed the campaign's operating environment in the Trump 2.0 administration.

Amazon Web Services is the cloud-and-data infrastructure backbone of the federal-immigration-enforcement supply chain the report maps. AWS's 204 federal data-hosting authorisations — more than any other commercial cloud provider — and its biometric-data hosting of 230 million unique identities through federal contracts give it the structural position of a non-substitutable supplier on which the operational continuity of much of the federal-cloud-dependent enforcement architecture rests. The report frames AWS not as an incidental cloud vendor whose customer happens to be ICE but as a foundational infrastructure partner without whose authorisations and biometric-hosting capacity the named downstream enforcement systems would not function at scale.

Microsoft Azure, Salesforce, and Northrop Grumman are documented in the report as the cloud-and-integration register of the supply chain: Microsoft for its federal-cloud and enterprise-software contracts with the Department of Homeland Security; Salesforce for its customer-relationship-management infrastructure within the immigration-enforcement workflow; and Northrop Grumman for the integration-services contracts under which federal immigration-enforcement systems are built and maintained. LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters are documented as the commercial-data-broker register: their public-records, court-records, vehicle-records, and demographic-data products are the commercial database infrastructure through which ICE purchases the personal records of immigrants, and the contracts under which those records flow operate without the immigration-status-specific restrictions that government-collected data would carry. The report also names — in additional contractor coverage beyond the public-facing #NoTechForICE target roster — Forensic Logic's Coplink law-enforcement records-sharing platform and Vigilant Solutions' licence-plate-reader feeds as additional pipes through which local-law-enforcement data routes into ICE enforcement.

The sanctuary-city loophole

The report's most consequential single substantive argument — the argument that has carried furthest into the U.S. policy and movement record — is what the Mijente announcement post summarised as the proposition that "sanctuary city" protections become ineffective when local law enforcement uses Palantir systems that feed information to ICE. The report walks through the data-flow mechanism: a "sanctuary city" policy formally prohibits local law-enforcement officers from cooperating with ICE on enforcement actions and from sharing information with ICE for enforcement purposes; but the same local-law-enforcement agency typically operates its case-management, records-management, and database-querying infrastructure on systems built or supplied by the same vendors — most prominently Palantir — that supply ICE; the systems are interoperable by design, and data entered into local-law-enforcement systems is structurally available to ICE through the shared vendor architecture irrespective of the local jurisdiction's stated policy. The argument's working implication is that the policy-side sanctuary-city protections that local U.S. jurisdictions enacted in the post-2017 period rest on a technology-side infrastructure that systematically undermines them, and that any sanctuary-city policy that does not address the vendor-supplied data-sharing infrastructure is operationally incomplete. The argument has carried into the campaign's continuing 2025-era Trump 2.0 programme demand for municipalities to commit to "robust sanctuary protections without loopholes" — a phrasing whose "without loopholes" qualifier carries forward the report's specific naming of the vendor-supplied data-sharing infrastructure as the structural loophole that policy-level sanctuary commitments alone cannot close.

Reception and the campaign launch

The report was released as the lead documentary artefact of the #NoTechForICE campaign — the campaign-and-hashtag launched at the report's release as Mijente's public-facing organising vehicle for the demand that the named corporate contractors end their ICE and CBP contracts. The campaign's articulated working architecture — five named goals across the exposing-and-educating, direct-action, tech-worker-and-student organising, and named-corporate-target tracks — was the public-facing translation of the report's substantive findings into an organising programme. Within twelve months of release the report had supplied the substantive ground for the campaign's earliest documented institutional-sponsorship win: the 5 June 2019 severance by UC Berkeley's Privacy Law Scholars Conference of its eight-year Palantir sponsorship under pressure from open letters signed by hundreds of academics. By the 19 November 2019 national student day of action a year after the report's release, the report's evidentiary record had been operationalised into a sixteen-university coordinated campus-organising wave at Stanford, UC Berkeley, Georgia Tech, Yale, the University of Chicago, Oxford, Cambridge, and other named institutions, targeting Palantir's career-fair recruitment as the principal lever on which the report's tech-talent-pipeline strategic framing could press.

The wider movement-side reception of the report came in three registers. The U.S. specialist-press uptake carried the report's findings through tech-and-policy outlets that had been tracking ICE's contracting record. The international-civil-society uptake travelled through U.S. and European grassroots-privacy-and-surveillance networks within which Mijente had standing relationships; the report's framing of the corporate-supply argument was adopted as the U.S. movement-side template through which tech-worker dissent against corporate complicity in state-violence systems would subsequently be carried. And the academic-side uptake travelled through the U.S. critical-tech-studies and immigration-and-criminology research communities, for which the report supplied an unusually thorough piece of independent civil-society research on a contracting register that had been substantially underdocumented in published academic work.

Travel into the downstream lineage

The report's most consequential downstream artefact is the strategic carry of its evidentiary record and its organising framing into the #NoTechForICE campaign's 2018-ongoing operational programme, and through that campaign into the corpus's wider U.S. tech-worker-conscience-and-student-pledge organising tradition. The campaign's continuing campus-pledge programme — 3,000+ signatories across 35+ U.S. and U.K. campuses pledging to refuse Palantir employment until the company ends its ICE contracts — operates on the report's named-target architecture. The campaign's documented contribution to Palantir's 2020 corporate-headquarters relocation from Palo Alto to Denver is the most-cited single corporate-side reputation outcome attributed to the report-and-campaign pairing. The campaign's continuing organising programme through the Biden administration and into the Trump 2.0 era — including the April 2025 ImmigrationOS contract and the named target-list update naming Dell and Hewlett-Packard alongside the original cohort — operates on the report's working theory that ICE's information infrastructure is a federation of corporate suppliers and that the corporate-complicity argument therefore holds at the level of the supply chain rather than at any single contract.

The report's principal downstream lineage outside the campaign itself is its travel into the 2021 No Tech For Apartheid campaign against Google and Amazon's Project Nimbus cloud contracting with the Israeli military. The 2021 campaign's name was explicitly modelled on Mijente's #NoTechForICE, and its operational architecture — anonymous-worker-letter form, student-pledge programme, on-campus career-fair tactics, and sponsorship-pressure register against academic and civic-institution sponsors of the named contractors — was drawn from the documented #NoTechForICE shape the report seeded. The downstream propagation is the report's most durable single legacy as a movement-organising artefact: a documented organising shape that travelled across three years, two regional contexts, and two distinct state-violence applications to anchor the U.S. movement-side template for tech-worker conscience as a coherent organising posture.

Position within the corpus

Within the corpus Who's Behind ICE? is the founding U.S. publication-side documentary artefact on the technology-and-data supply chain into U.S. immigration enforcement, the foundational documentary spine of the #NoTechForICE campaign, and the report that anchors the corpus's standing vocabulary on surveillance-tech accountability in the U.S. immigration-enforcement context — the federal-contracting "revolving door" framing, the sanctuary-city data-sharing-loophole framing, the "mission critical" framing of Palantir's case-management systems to ICE, and the broader #NoTechForICE framing the corpus's existing surveillance-tech-and-immigration-enforcement entries operate from. The report closes the corpus's depth gap on the publication side of the U.S. tech-and-immigration-enforcement organising lineage: Mijente was already in the corpus as the organisational anchor of the campaign and the Take Back Tech convening series, the campaign and its message were already in the corpus, and the report was load-bearing in every one of those entries' bodies without being a standalone publication entry of its own.

As a publication type Who's Behind ICE? fills the report slot in the surveillance-tech-accountability publication slate. On the U.S. immigration-and-tech contracting register specifically it has no peer in the corpus — the report is the corpus's first and so far only standalone publication entry on the federal-immigration-enforcement tech-contracting supply chain — and it sits as the U.S. immigration-side complement to the corpus's existing surveillance-and-state-power publications on adjacent enforcement registers (the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition's local-policing-surveillance organising; the African continent content-moderator labour-conditions work of the Foxglove and African Content Moderators Union campaigns; the European data-protection-and-platform-work register documented in the Managed by Bots report). The report's lasting movement-side contribution is that it operationalised the supply-chain-mapping research method as a civil-society organising instrument: the documented contractor-by-contractor record was not produced as policy-audience analysis but as the substantive ground on which an organising campaign with named corporate targets, a named coalition, and a named multi-front programme of demands could be staged — and the documented seven-and-a-half-year operational record of the campaign that the report seeded is the corpus's clearest single demonstration of how a foundational civil-society research artefact can translate, through a coupled organising vehicle, into a sustained multi-year programme of corporate-accountability pressure.