Inside ICE's $12 Million Plan To Map Immigrants' "Patterns Of Life"

Immigration officials will spend $12.2 million to deploy Project SAFE HAVEN, an AI geotracking tool that “transforms the way we identify, locate, and map illegal migrants.”

https://www.levernews.com/inside-ices-12-million-plan-to-map-immigrants-patterns-of-life/

https://archive.ph/uOUC6


(AP Photo/Gregory Bull and Pexels/Maik Poblocki, Efe Burak Baydar, Markus Spiske)

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) just inked a $12.2 million contract for an artificial intelligence tool that claims to map out immigrants’ daily routines, habits, and real-time location and categorize them as potential threats, per procurement records reviewed by The Lever. Dubbed “Project SAFE HAVEN,” the product is advertised by defense vendor Edge Ops LLC as a “question-based AI interface” that uses “persistent passive data collection” to map “patterns of life,” a surveillance tactic that ICE says will identify the “habitual locations, routes, and behavioral patterns” of its targets.

Additional features of the technology described in procurement documents include real-time location tracking and analysis that will categorize individuals and groups as affiliated with ostensible criminal organizations, such as gangs or cartels. That includes building “target profiles” that track individuals’ activity by linking data obtained from Wi-Fi network connections and mobile smart devices, such as cellphones and smartwatches. A promotional blurb for the tool on Edge Ops LLC’s website claims that Project SAFE HAVEN “transforms the way we identify, locate, and map illegal migrants.” ICE’s purchase of the tool was made public in federal procurement records released this week.

Under the Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, has been granted a multi-billion-dollar slush fund, which it is using to build out its surveillance dragnet. The agency has already amassed a vast arsenal of surveillance tools that can monitor everything from the location of hundreds of millions of phones to real-time social media content. In this case, Project SAFE HAVEN was purchased specifically for the Homeland Security Task Force National Coordination Center, a hub for information sharing between ICE, the U.S. military, and other federal agencies.

As The Intercept reported in February, little is known about this center's operations. Testimony from federal officials indicates that the entity serves as the primary coordinating hub for the regional homeland security task forces that have proliferated under the Trump administration, and which are supposedly “combating cartels” and other criminal organizations. These task forces involve collaboration between ICE and other federal agencies, including the Pentagon and the FBI. As of last month, ICE had allocated $440 million to the homeland security task force program, per Office of Management and Budget records reviewed by The Lever.

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