Immigration and Customs Enforcement is looking for an AI software that can monitor the phone and video calls and movements of immigrants at detention centers.
The system would use transcriptions and voice-recognition technology to monitor who detainees are talking to and the contents of the calls, as well as data from cameras, according to a document the agency posted Friday on a federal government contracting website.
ICE is looking for software that can integrate information it already gathers to generate leads on safety and security concerns and potential criminal activity that an employee would review. The document refers to the software as the “Suite” and it would run 24/7, storing profiles of detainees.
“ICE facilities generate authorized telephone, messaging, tablet, video-visitation, detainee management, movement, incident, and camera data at volumes that cannot be reviewed and correlated manually in a timely manner,” the document states.
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The publishing of the request for information from potential contractors marks a preliminary step in finding a company to provide the service. Watchdog group Project Salt Box first reported on the document.
Immigration policy and data experts raised concerns about how ICE would use the data it could potentially gather to target undocumented families outside of detention. The proposed system is part of an expansion of AI that the Department of Homeland Security is using to track immigrants and citizens during the second Trump administration.
“It’s basically bringing AI into the game of superpowering ICE even more,” said Todd Schulte, president of the immigrants’ rights advocacy group FWD.us.
While ICE already monitors detainees’ telephone and video calls that are not related to legal matters, the software would expand that surveillance through voice recognition. The aim would be to maintain profiles that track whether the person the detainee talks to in any given call is the person the software associates with the number dialed. ICE labeled the person not matching the associated phone number “receiver-side deception.”
Steven Hubbard, a senior data scientist at the American Immigration Council who has been keeping tabs on how the agency is using AI, said such a program could add to mistakes.
“Especially with biometric data, there can be lots of different errors that happen, and then once that is entered into the system, then it becomes sort of a black box where you don’t know how AI is making those determinations or summarizations that can cause problems or create errors,” he said.
Using video camera feeds at the detention centers, the software would need to flag fights, falls, signs of aggression and self-harm, according to the ICE document. During President Donald Trump’s second term, people in ICE detention have committed suicide at an unparalleled rate, according to an Associated Press investigation.
Schulte and David Bier, the Cato Institute’s director of immigration studies, expressed skepticism that ICE would use the software to protect the detainees’ well-being.
“People are committing suicide because they feel hopeless and are cut off from their lives, and feeling like you can’t communicate freely with people on the outside would potentially exacerbate that problem,” Bier said.
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