Federal surveillance tools and tactics: An explainer

As protesters gathered earlier this year in Minneapolis and other U.S. cities in opposition to federal immigration policy, news organizations like 404 Media revealed the tools and tactics that federal officers and agents have been using to monitor citizens and non-citizens.

While a small number of news outlets have done extensive investigations, there remains much reporting left to do on federal surveillance capabilities, according to two experts we recently spoke with — Marianna Poyares, a fellow at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, and Rachel Levinson-Waldman, director of the Liberty and National Security Program at New York University’s Brennan Center.

This explainer will get reporters up to speed on some of the technologies federal officers and agents have access to that can read license plates, recognize faces and query databases.

There are two main federal agencies that enforce immigration laws: Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, which are both under the Department of Homeland Security.

One important distinction between those agencies is that, although they often work together, they have different mandates for where they operate. CBP officers and agents generally enforce immigration laws and can conduct warrantless stops, by federal law, within 100 air miles of U.S. land borders and coastlines. They also operate at more than 300 land, air and sea ports.

ICE officers and agents enforce immigration laws within the country. When asking sources questions about ICE and CBP, it’s helpful to know the mandates and authorities of those agencies, and to be precise about the agency you’re talking about.

Keep reading for insights on surveillance technologies, how local and federal agents cooperate and constitutional considerations at play. Plus, five questions based on our interviews with Poyares and Levinson-Waldman that journalists can use to kick off investigations into federal surveillance in their coverage area.

Government data infrastructure has taken decades to develop. AI is now helping power it

License plate readers. Facial recognition apps. Interconnected databases. These tools and systems are the product of decades of government and private investment. They exist because of policy and procurement choices made over decades — choices that journalists can scrutinize.

For example, federal immigration agents have reportedly used facial recognition software called Mobile Fortify to scan the faces of both citizens and non-citizens.

“Mobile Fortify runs on a mobile device and can capture facial images, contactless fingerprints, and photographs of identity documents,” according to a DHS inventory of artificial intelligence technologies its agencies use or are considering using, published in January 2026.

The app has been used more than 100,000 times since it was launched in June 2025, according to court documents cited by Mother Jones. According to the DHS inventory, the government purchased the Mobile Fortify system from NEC, a multinational corporation headquartered in Japan.

After a federal agent captures faces, fingerprints or documents using Mobile Fortify, the app uses AI models owned by CBP to match that information to government records, according to the inventory.

“This administration especially has made clear that it wants very few restrictions on how it uses AI in any number of realms,” Levinson-Waldman says.

The Department of Homeland Security is also working toward a unified database of biometric data, including faces and fingerprints, according to Wired. In December 2025, DHS authorized CBP officers to collect facial biometric data from noncitizens entering or leaving airports, land ports and sea ports.

Systems like Mobile Fortify “are only able to operate in the way that they operate because they rely on a larger data sharing and data analytics infrastructure,” Poyares says. “That has been steadily growing for at least the last 20 years. I think this is a particularly important element that sometimes folks lose sight of.”

Some local law enforcement agencies are sharing license plate scanning data with federal agents, according to research and reporting.

A company called Flock Safety produces many of the cameras that scan license plates on U.S. streets. Local law enforcement agencies often use the information to solve crimes. Flock has contracts with more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies, according to NPR.

404 Media last year documented more than 4,000 instances of local and state police looking up Flock data on behalf of federal law enforcement. Reporters Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox write that, “while Flock does not have a contract with ICE, the agency sources data from Flock’s cameras by making requests to local law enforcement.”

In a January 2026 statement, the company said “ICE does not have direct access to Flock cameras, systems, or data, unless the agencies that control their data expressly and deliberately allow it.”

Researchers from the University of Washington used records requests to identify eight law enforcement agencies from that state that allowed U.S. Border Patrol access to their Flock license plate reader networks during 2025.

“[T]he fact that the searches occurred raises important questions about compliance with Washington’s Keep Washington Working law, which bars law enforcement agencies across the state from dedicating local resources for purposes of civil immigration enforcement,” the researchers write in an October 2025 report on their findings.

How law enforcement and federal immigration agents cooperate

Local law enforcement officers, like police and detectives, enforce criminal law.

Federal agents doing immigration enforcement mostly enforce civil law. Someone without proper documentation to be in the U.S. may face civil penalties, such as removal from the country, but not jail time.

(Despite this, ICE was holding nearly 70,000 people awaiting proceedings or removal in “non-punitive” detention centers in February. Nearly three-quarters did not have a criminal conviction, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.)

Those caught entering or re-entering the country after deportation can face criminal charges. But removal hearings before a judge are civil proceedings, regardless of any separate criminal charges. Immigrants have a right to a removal hearing and have a right to hire a lawyer, but they don’t have the right to a court-appointed attorney during a removal hearing, according to a Brennan Center explainer.

“A full removal hearing about whether an immigrant is removable and eligible for a form of relief like asylum, for example, can be concluded in as little as two or three hours,” writes Margy O’Herron, a senior fellow at Brennan. “Removal hearings may take place in person at an immigration court, or some or all of the parties may appear remotely via video conference. Removal hearings generally are open to the public and the press.”

States, counties and cities that have policies limiting local law enforcement cooperation with federal immigration authorities are often called sanctuary jurisdictions. Policies vary by jurisdiction.

The Department of Justice, following an April 2025 executive order, published a list of states, cities and counties it considers sanctuary jurisdictions. The Department of Homeland Security last May published a more extensive list of sanctuary jurisdictions. That list has since been taken down, but it’s archived here.

Outside of sanctuary jurisdictions, local-federal cooperation has deepened in recent years across presidential administrations with 287(g) agreements. The program was pared back under President Barack Obama, then revitalized during the terms of President Donald Trump.

The agreements allow state and local law agencies to “perform a function of an immigration officer,” under the Immigration and Nationality Act. That specific authority is executed under what are known as task force agreements. ICE has task force agreements with more than 1,000 agencies ​in 32 ​states ​and ​two territories, according to agency data.

The Fourth Amendment and the data broker loophole

The Fourth Amendment provides the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Courts have historically interpreted the Fourth Amendment as allowing for a reasonable expectation of privacy. That expectation does not, however, extend to public spaces.

For example, if you’re walking down a public street, someone else can see which direction you’re headed. Anything an average person could observe in public, so can a law enforcement officer, Levinson-Waldman explains.

Police typically can sit in their vehicles on a public street and stake out your home without a warrant, for example. But police departments are limited by internal rules and resources — there aren’t enough officers to stake out everyone.

“When you have the kind of technology — whether it’s GPS trackers or all of the cell phone location information or other kinds of things that enable very easy, very cheap surveillance — it basically evades all of those structural limitations, and at that point does implicate Fourth Amendment protections,” Levinson-Waldman says. “I think there are good arguments that at least some of these kinds of activities violate the Fourth Amendment, but the case law is very much in development.”

Combined with the general lack of privacy in public there is something called the data broker loophole. While there are federal protections for certain things, like medical and financial data, there are no broad data privacy protections in the U.S.

That means app companies can and do collect huge amounts of data from users, which the federal government then buys from data brokers that compile that information.

“Although we and other organizations have argued that effectively enables a runaround around the Fourth Amendment,” Levinson-Waldman says, “there’s no law prohibiting it, by and large, and the Supreme Court hasn’t yet said that that’s unconstitutional. Those things in combination really enable a lot of this activity.”

Data brokers with reported government contracts include PenLink, Thomson Reuters, and Clearview AI. Journalists and anyone else can use SAM.gov to start hunting down contracts between data brokers and government entities.

“I really think that the media has, right now, a very, very important role to play,” Poyares says.

5 questions journalists can pursue

Which firms are behind surveillance technologies?

Many surveillance technologies are contracted and not created in-house at government agencies. The DHS AI Use Case Inventory Library is a good place to start looking into which companies are making surveillance technologies.

Why is data being gathered?

How long is data being retained — and what information systems at other agencies is data being fed into?

Which specific technologies are being used to identify protesters and observers?

When possible, identify and report on the apps and other technologies that federal agents are using in public during protests and other gatherings.

How do the technologies work in the field?

Does an agent using an app to identify people in public need to be up close to someone, or can these apps be used from points further away, such as across a street?

When drones are used to surveil protesters, what software do they run on and where is information retained?

“Where else was CBP using drones?” Levinson-Waldman asks. “What authority did CBP have in the first place to collect that information? I think there is still probably a lot to look into on the drones front.”

Further reading

Thoughtlessness in the Age of Homeland Security: Race, Surveillance, and Bureaucratic Violence in Immigration Enforcement
Dennis Young. Polity, January 2025.

American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century
Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology. Updated May 2025.

Biometric Tracking and Immigration
Elena Roe. Virginia Tech case study, June 2025.

The Impacts of Restrictive Interior Immigration Enforcement on Undocumented Immigrants’ Decisions: Self-Deportation Out of Fear?
Jihye Park and Rene Rocha. The Sociological Quarterly, September 2025.

Raiding the Genome: How the United States Government Is Abusing Its Immigration Powers to Amass DNA for Future Policing
Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology. September 2025.

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