美國移民和海關執法局（ICE）計劃斥資 $100 million 推行 ERO ONE 國內監控計劃，擬部署 142 名情報人員

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.

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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.

“Not just necessarily sitting members of Congress, but anyone, and especially members of the immigrant community,” Wriston said. “No one is safe. No one.”

THE PLAN DOES NOT SPECIFY WHAT OR WHOM ICE is looking for with this increased spying capability. But one of the components that caused former intelligence contractors’ concern was that ERO ONE agents will analyze both classified and nonclassified information to produce “network, link and relationship” analyses. That type of analysis involves researching not only a target, but also every other person to whom they’re connected, including household members, family members, friends, acquaintances, or the person with whom they carpool to work.

According to the statement of work, contractors will be tasked with conducting analytical research “to identify and assess relationships among individuals, organizations, locations, events, activities, data points, and other entities.” They will review information to identify “known, reported, or potential relationships; recurring patterns; organizational structures; associations; areas of convergence; temporal or geographic connections; and other linkages relevant to the assigned intelligence requirement.” Contractors will then “evaluate the significance and reliability” of the relationships and “prepare link charts, network diagrams, timelines, analytical summaries, written assessments, or other related products” for ICE to use.

Military intelligence agents compile the same type of research, Wriston said. He knows because he did that job.

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“We’ve seen this time and time again. It’s the imperial boomerang,” said Wriston, who is also a data journalist and the founder of ICE watchdog group Project Salt Box, where he reported on ERO ONE the day the first document went live and has written about it since. “These are the kinds of things that happened in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, for years. Now that methodology is being brought into the ICE space.”

Federal documents likewise do not detail the specific sources of information agents will analyze, only that all agents must possess previously awarded active top secret clearance, with eligibility to access Sensitive Compartmented Information. That’s a type of information that must be accessed through certain formal control systems managed by the Director of National Intelligence, a position held by Trump ally Jay Clayton. The agents will not make any decisions about what to do with the information they compile.

Wriston said that except for the fact that ICE officials are trying to make immigration a matter of national security, it’s unclear why they need this program when they already have the Homeland Security Investigations unit, which conducted the raid on Omar’s house, to research targets. His immediate worry, he said, is that the program will make it easier for the government to find terrified immigrants hiding at home because they think they’ll be safe there.

ICE PLANS TO SEND THE 142 AGENTS, plus two project managers, to locations in Atlanta, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Dallas, D.C., Denver, Detroit, El Paso, Harlingen (Texas), Houston, Laguna Niguel (California), Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Paul, and Williston (Vermont), according to the statement of work.

Details in the document, and the rapid timeline, show that the Trump administration intends to use the program immediately, said Brian Murphy, a government contractor who worked for 25 years with ICE parent agency DHS. It’s rare for the government to only want workers with top secret clearance, he said.

“I’ve only seen it when there is an imminent need to work on something right now,” he told the Prospect. “Trump has two years in office. He can’t wait … they want to get rolling on this immediately.”

The program description is so broad that Murphy said he thinks the goal goes beyond targeting immigrants. “I think it’s darker than that,” because the agency could use the intelligence to attack people with identities and views the Trump regime doesn’t like. “The question for DHS is, what is the threat they’re trying to go after?”

The federal government can easily change who qualifies as a threat and produce data that backs up the reasoning, Murphy said, and used as an example annual Homeland Threat Assessments. In 2020, Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf identified white supremacist extremists as “the most persistent and lethal threat in the Homeland.” But by last year, that threat had disappeared from the report, except to appear once in a glossary of terms. The rest of the report focused heavily on Trump administration priorities as national security threats, including immigrants crossing the border with Mexico and transnational criminal organizations.

In addition, the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti have shown how the government views protesters against ICE abductions as an abiding threat. In a national security directive known as NSPM-7, President Trump identified anti-fascist protesters as domestic terrorists and proposed an architecture to disrupt and counter dissent.

“If you want to draw a narrative that the real threat to America is whatever you want it to be, you can very easily do that. You just stop gathering intel on militias,” Murphy said. “It’s like any other police state. If you ask it to find something to make my opponents the enemy, well, you can do that.”

Legal liability should be a major concern for anyone who bids on the ERO ONE contract, Murphy said, because it’s unclear whether the information they’d be charged with accessing had been gathered legally. He added, “It’s very, very concerning that they’re fast-tracking this.”

Stanley, the ACLU analyst, noted that immigration officials across agencies have been using an excessive amount of surveillance tools for years, including their “Stingray” cell tower simulators, automatic license plate readers, and tools that track location from cellphones. They use a facial recognition and biometric collection app called Mobile Fortify, a Palantir app called ImmigrationOS to track immigrants’ movements, and buy data from LexisNexis to identify someone’s family and work history. ERO ONE would draw on all of that information, plus an expanded group of sources to reach into the private lives of anyone it wants, intelligence experts said.

ICE already knows its potential bidders for ERO ONE, said Diana Brozi, the procurement specialist listed on the document. She told the Prospect it was unlikely the agency would hold an industry day and declined to provide further information.

DHS did not respond to a request for information or comment on the claim that the program could be used to spy on political enemies.