President Donald Trump made countering immigration one of his flagship issues during last year’s presidential campaign, promising an unprecedented number of deportations.
In his first eight months in office, that promise turned into around 350,000 deportations, a figure that includes deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE (around 200,000), Customs and Border Protection (more than 132,000), and almost 18,000 self-deportations, according to CNN.
ICE has taken center stage in Trump’s mass deportation campaign, raiding homes, workplaces, and public parks in search of undocumented immigrants. To aid its efforts, ICE has at its disposal several technologies capable of identifying and surveilling individuals and communities.
Here is a recap of some of the technology that ICE has in its digital arsenal.
Cell-site Simulators Devices
ICE has a technology known as cell-site simulators to snoop on cellphones. These surveillance devices, as the name suggests, are designed to appear as a cellphone tower, tricking nearby phones to connect to them. Once that happens, the law enforcement authorities who are using the cell-site simulators can locate and identify the phones in their vicinity, and potentially intercept calls, text messages, and internet traffic.
Cell-site simulators are also known as “stingrays,” based on the brand name of one of the earliest versions of the technology, which was made by U.S. defense contractor Harris (now L3Harris); or IMSI catchers, a technology that can capture a nearby cell phone’s unique identifier which law enforcement can use for identifying the phone’s owner.
In the last two years, ICE has signed contracts for more than $1.5 million with a company called TechOps Specialty Vehicles (TOSV), which produces customized vans for law enforcement.
A contract worth more than $800,000 dated May 8, 2025 said TOSV will provide “Cell Site Simulator (CSS) Vehicles to support the Homeland Security Technical Operations program.”
TOSV president Jon Brianas told TechCrunch that the company does not manufacture the cell-site simulators, but rather integrates them “into our overall design of the vehicle.”
Cell-site simulators have long been …