ICE Planning $100 Million ‘Nightmare’ Domestic Spy Program

Under ERO ONE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to hire 142 intelligence contractors with top secret clearances and deploy them in cities across the country.

By Whitney Curry Wimbish, The American Prospect

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is fast-tracking a $100 million domestic surveillance program to put 142 intelligence agents in more than two dozen cities and the District of Columbia, in what contracting and surveillance experts said would be a significant expansion of the agency’s ability to reach into private lives.

The new program is called the Enforcement and Removal Operations Overwatch and National Security Enforcement, or ERO ONE, described in documents posted last month on federal procurement websites.

Under the program, agents would analyze classified and unclassified information to identify “trends, patterns, relationships, threats, and intelligence gaps,” and provide ICE with briefings for Enforcement and Removal Operation missions, according to a statement of work published on September 18. A forecasting document published a week earlier said that the solicitation will likely be released on December 10. Intelligence contracting experts said the timeline suggests ICE will award the contract around February.

“It looks dangerously like the construction of an internal spying agency,” said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, who has written extensively on immigration agencies’ mass surveillance. “It’s a nightmare in the making.”

It’s also a weapon that the government will likely use against not only undocumented immigrants, but everyone else, too. That includes political enemies, intelligence experts said. Speaking with the Prospect on Monday as news broke that the Trump regime had raided progressive Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar’s D.C. home, former military intelligence analyst Michael Wriston said that “you’d expect to see more of this” under ERO ONE.