$100 Million ICE “Intelligence” Program is a Domestic Secret Police Agency in the Making

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A new ICE program called ERO ONE would install 142 “intelligence” analysts to engage in what sounds like a sweepingly broad and vague fishing expedition to collect data and identify “threats.” In our current context, this program could not be more ominous, raising the specter of a secret police-like body that pokes around vast datasets looking for threats and enemies everywhere.

The program came to light through federal procurement documents posted online last month and reported on by data journalist and military analyst Michael Wriston and the American Prospect.

The most detailed description of the program (the full name of which is “Enforcement and Removal Operations Overwatch and National Security Enforcement”) is in a “statement of work” document, which says that ICE “requires contractor-provided intelligence” by personnel who

will support ERO ONE in researching, evaluating, integrating, and analyzing information from authorized sources; identifying trends, patterns, relationships, threats, and intelligence gaps; preparing intelligence products and briefings; supporting established intelligence requirements; and providing related analytical support to ERO mission activities.

All of this intelligence work will not be directed at some foreign government, but inward at American society. Probably the most concerning elements of the conceived “Overwatch” mission are those that involve identifying threats and that involve “network, link, and relationship analysis.” Social network analysis — figuring out who is connected to who — implies suspicionless mass surveillance, giant databases about everyone’s lives, and the use of guilt-by-association to investigate an ever-widening scope of people. The term “threat identification” implies mass surveillance, algorithmic and AI evaluation of oceans of data, exploration of the lives of people not suspected of wrongdoing, and, inevitably, large numbers of ordinary people falsely suspected of involvement in wrongdoing.

Talk of looking for threats is doubly ominous in an administration running a mass deportation campaign fundamentally based on a lie — that there are 100 million people (roughly one-third of the country) who should be deported, and that undocumented immigrants are likely to commit violent crime— and consistently conflates immigration with national security threats. As the ACLU documented in a report issued last week that catalogues how the Trump administration has used the machinery of mass deportation to attack our civil liberties, it has also consistently claimed that constitutionally protected protest activity, criticism of the Trump Administration, and criticism of Donald Trump personally poses a threat to national security and public safety. This is an administration that has directed the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute the president’s perceived personal enemies and, through its infamous NSPM-7, directs federal departments and law enforcement agencies to use all their authorities to investigate civil society nonprofits, activists, donors, and others, supposedly to “disrupt” “violent conduct.” The administration in its directive claims such conduct is motivated by “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

In that light, hiring 172 “Intelligence Research Specialists” to use classified and unclassified sources of data for “overwatch” becomes a truly threatening step. Other frightening context on this announcement includes:

• This program is not the only way in which immigration agencies are transmogrifying into domestic intelligence agencies. The Border Patrol is already monitoring drivers nationwide inside the United States for “suspicious” travel patterns and working with other agencies to stop and search people’s vehicles in what amounts to a nationwide domestic, mass-surveillance-based intelligence operation, the Associated Press reported in November 2025.
• The administration and the tech companies that are building its surveillance state are enamored with AI, and it’s reasonable to expect that much of what these analysts will be doing is using AI to use data to sift through the lives of Americans en masse, make inferences about them and the people they’re connected to, and to make judgments about the “threat” they supposedly pose. We’re already seeing this being done for example with license plate data by vendors and in the Border Patrol program. No doubt license plate scans will be part of what is fed to ERO ONE analysts.
• The administration has been ignoring the law to aggregate numerous government databases full of information on American citizens and residents — and hasn’t been hesitant to deploy aggregated databases against American citizens and non-citizens alike in its deportation drive.
• The government wants these intelligence analysts to be provided by private contractors, part of a trend of increasing reliance on big tech companies to carry out surveillance for the government, in some cases allowing for end-runs around the Constitution, not to mention providing questionable access to government data by for-profit firms.

Beware of “intelligence” units in law enforcement
“Intelligence” is of course generally a good thing, but the term is inherently ominous when describing a law enforcement organization. The word has a dark history, going back to J. Edgar Hoover as well as Cold War police urban intelligence units or “Red Squads” that engaged in surveillance and disruption of social movements agitating for change or against wars. More recently it has been intertwined with “predictive policing” approaches that smack of dystopian science-fiction “pre-crime.” Like “threat identification,” the term “intelligence” within policing implies proactively detecting things within society that would not otherwise come to the government’s attention — which in turn incentivizes privacy invasions if not mass surveillance.

Traditionally, law enforcement would begin an investigation when a dead body showed up, or another crime was reported to them, and officers would work outward from the known evidence and known suspects. But some offenses such as drug possession and other victimless crimes don’t generate an aggrieved party who has an incentive to report it, encouraging law enforcement to start poking around in people’s private lives if they want to detect them — the same kind of poking around that intelligence units have often done.

ICE is likewise hunting through domestic American society to find violators. It’s doing so in pursuit of its stated goal to deport millions of people — including many who have lived here for years if not decades, with work permits and under legal statuses this administration has just terminated. It is hunting through society not only physically with roving patrols on our streets, but as we have increasingly seen, via data. That means that a campaign such as the Trump Administration’s inevitably sweeps in American citizens. And for an administration with little respect for legal boundaries, makes it easy for that agency’s mission to slide into domestic spying.

Congress needs to take a close look at this program, and at a minimum ask hard questions such as:

• What, exactly, are the boundaries of this program’s mission? The Mission of ICE’s ERO division is to locate people for deportation. Why is this program called “Overwatch”?
• What role, exactly, does “threat identification” play in ERO’s mission?
• What role will AI play in this program?
• What oversight will this program be subject to?
• Exactly what sources of data that include information about American citizens will be used in this program?

The name ERO ONE sounds like something straight out of Andor, the Star Wars show about the Empire’s authoritarian machinery, and there’s no doubt the Emperor would be a fan.