The Department of Homeland Security isn’t letting privacy concerns slow its push to round up immigrants — and it’s paying big to break into their phones.
DHS has dramatically boosted funding for Cellebrite, the Israeli digital surveillance firm whose tools let federal agents crack open cellphones and tablets, according to The PunchUp Substack, which cited federal procurement data.
ICE has “earmarked roughly $96 million” for the company under a new five-year contract, a jump of about 170 percent over the agency’s previous $35.5 million deal struck in 2019, the newsletter reported. ICE burned through nearly all of that earlier funding and paid Cellebrite an extra $11.1 million just to bridge the gap while the new terms got hashed out. The agency says the technology will help it “further criminal investigations” into “non-cooperative subjects.”
According to the report, “DHS has rapidly expanded its surveillance capabilities under the second Trump administration while refusing to confirm exactly who it is targeting, or to what extent. It is facing multiple lawsuits for failing to hand over information on its alleged use of that tech against migrants, protesters, and other groups caught up in Donald Trump’s nationwide immigration crackdown.”
“We should not have to go to federal court to force the government to hand over these records,” Ian Head, manager of the Open Records Project at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told PunchUp. “This administration wants to hide its abusive, Orwellian behavior, but we are fighting back.”
Word of the deal first surfaced in May, the report notes, when DHS was reportedly weighing a contract worth up to $100 million for the phone-cracking tech. The award notice went live Sept. 3, with ICE landing close to the top of that forecast — the latest expansion in a surveillance buildout that’s already alarmed senators and left immigrants facing a “terrifying” new front in Trump’s deportation machine.
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