ICE Runs Its Mass Deportation Machine From America’s Bluest State

One of these facilities is the National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center, or NCATC, which serves as the nexus for intelligence that is sent to ICE’s 25 enforcement and removal operations, or ERO, field offices across the country. The intelligence packaged by the NCATC for ERO “door kickers” includes biographical information, criminal history, immigration history, custody data, immigration benefit information, naturalization information, and vehicle and insurance data. Thanks to a memorandum of understanding signed in April by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, it now also includes IRS data, the legality of which is being contested in court. 

Per ICE’s own documentation, the NCATC routinely queries data sets containing vast numbers of U.S. citizens. In addition to data owned and maintained by the government, the NCATC also sends queries, “on a weekly basis,” to commercial data brokers hunting for information on targets the government can’t collect itself. This month, dozens of protesters gathered outside the NCATC to protest the center’s plan to hire some dozen open-source intelligence analysts to work round the clock scouring social media for information to use further targeting immigrants for deportation. 

But these hires pale in comparison to the 100 new employees that the Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, Williston tip line plans to hire, according to a federal solicitation posted at the beginning of the month. While HSI special agents previously worked high-profile drug and human smuggling cases, the Trump administration has increasingly pulled HSI special agents into the dragnet of mass immigration enforcement on targets who have not been accused of major crimes. With 100 new staffers, the HSI tip line is ramping up to take any and all tips, no matter how small.