Privacy Advocates Warn ICE's Social Media Monitoring Could Expand to Friends and Relatives of Targets: Report

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is seeking private contractors to run a 24/7 social media monitoring program that would turn public posts into immigration enforcement leads, a move privacy advocates say could extend surveillance to friends and relatives of flagged individuals, according to a request for information analyzed by the Bucks County Beacon.

The request for information envisions analysts working in shifts to comb "Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, VK, Flickr, Myspace, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Reddit, WhatsApp, YouTube, etc.," with strict turnaround times for producing dossiers.

The Bucks County Beacon reports that contractors would scrape publicly available posts, messages, and media, then correlate those findings with commercial datasets from LexisNexis Accurint and Thomson Reuters CLEAR and with government databases.

The resulting files would feed directly into Palantir's Investigative Case Management system alongside license plate scans, utility records, property data, and biometrics. A researcher cited by the outlet warned that when one person is flagged, "their friends, relatives, fellow organizers or any of their acquaintances can also become subjects of scrutiny," pointing to past contracts for facial recognition and location data that grew beyond initial scopes.

ICE frames the proposal as modernization to identify aliases, locations, and patterns that traditional methods might miss. Planning documents state that contractors cannot create fake profiles and must store analysis on ICE servers.

Civil-liberties groups counter that guardrails have failed before, citing informal data sharing between local police and federal agents, bulk data purchases to bypass warrants, and the reinstatement of surveillance tools despite executive freezes.

Further details published in October by Wired describe a plan to staff permanent "watch floors" at two targeting centers—Williston, Vermont, and Santa Ana, California—with nearly 30 private analysts operating around the clock.

Urgent cases would require a 30-minute turnaround, with one hour for other high-priority matters. Vendors are asked to integrate AI to accelerate targeting and case development, and to merge open-web data with commercial databases.

The Beacon report situates the monitoring within a broader tech stack that already includes tools from Clearview AI, ShadowDragon's SocialNet, Babel Street's Locate X, LexisNexis, and PenLink. Advocates urge disclosure of scoring algorithms and warrant standards equivalent to physical searches, warning that an expanding "digital border" risks chilling speech and civic participation far beyond primary targets.