Which specific ICE technologies and vendors are tied to Israeli companies and what contracts exist?
Executive summary
ICE has publicly tied at least two Israeli-founded surveillance vendors to its investigative toolkit: Paragon Solutions (maker of Graphite spyware) under a roughly $2 million contract and Cellebrite (phone-extraction tools) under multi-million dollar contracts reportedly totaling about $11 million; both relationships have drawn congressional inquiries, lawsuits, and temporary agency freezes or stop-work orders [1] [2] [3] [4]. Reporting also situates those vendors inside a broader surveillance ecosystem — including long-standing contracts with firms such as Palantir and Babel that feed analysis and identification systems — although the precise operational use, scope, and redacted technical details remain contested or unreleased in public records [5] [6].
1. Paragon Solutions and Graphite: a $2 million spyware contract reactivated
ICE signed a roughly $2 million contract with Paragon Solutions — the Israeli-founded company behind Graphite, a commercial spyware product that can infiltrate smartphones and encrypted apps — originally awarded in September 2024, paused under a Biden-era compliance review, and reactivated in 2025 after agency paperwork lifted a stop-work order [1] [2] [7]. Multiple outlets reported the reactivation and have traced the administrative pauses to executive-order scrutiny over U.S. government use of foreign-made spyware; lawmakers subsequently demanded details about ICE’s legal justifications and target lists for Graphite deployments [2] [8].
2. Cellebrite: long-running phone-extraction contracts worth millions
ICE has contracted with Cellebrite — an Israeli company known for device-unlocking hardware and software that extracts and organizes data from seized phones — for more than a decade, and civil-rights filings and press releases state ICE currently holds two active contracts with Cellebrite that together amount to approximately $11 million [4] [3]. Those contracts and license arrangements are documented in litigation and advocacy disclosures seeking FOIA records to reveal how the tools are used domestically, with privacy advocates arguing that the tools magnify surveillance of immigrant communities [4] [3].
3. Broader surveillance partners and Israeli links: Palantir, Babel and technology transfer
Reporting places Israeli tech and doctrine at the center of a network that feeds ICE’s operations: U.S. data-mining and analytics firms such as Palantir and Babel became institutional suppliers to ICE after 2015 and are described as core to ICE’s “immigrationOS” and data fusion efforts, while training, joint programs, and industrial partnerships have encouraged transfers of methods and capabilities between Israeli security vendors and U.S. agencies [5] [9]. Sources note that some companies cultivated in Israel’s security ecosystem now supply tools for social-media monitoring, license-plate reading, and AI-assisted targeting that plug into ICE databases, though the direct contractual links between every Israeli firm and ICE vary in clarity and public documentation [6] [5].
4. Legal and political fallout: FOIAs, lawsuits, congressional letters
Civil-rights groups including Just Futures Law and the Center for Constitutional Rights have filed FOIA requests and lawsuits to compel disclosure of ICE and CBP contracts and deployment records related to Paragon and Cellebrite, arguing secrecy prevents public oversight of potentially intrusive tools [4] [3]. Members of Congress have sent letters seeking the agency’s internal legal justifications and records on who has been targeted; at the same time, vendors defend their products as crime- and counterterrorism-focused — an industry line that clashes with advocates’ claims about misuse against journalists, activists, and immigrants [8] [2].
5. Known gaps and redactions: what public reporting does not show
Public procurement notices, press reporting, and advocacy filings establish the existence and rough dollar amounts of Paragon’s $2 million contract and Cellebrite’s multi-contract $11 million relationship, but redactions and withheld records prevent confirmation of operational details — which Graphite modules were licensed, the number and identity of targets, real-world deployments, or internal ICE policies governing use — and reporting repeatedly flags those as the central unknowns driving litigation and oversight demands [7] [4] [2].
6. Competing narratives and incentives
Vendors and some officials frame these contracts as narrowly lawful tools to investigate serious crime, while civil-rights groups, some lawmakers, and investigative reporters warn the technologies can be repurposed for broad surveillance and deportation enforcement; industry and government incentives to limit public disclosure — citing national security or investigative secrecy — create a persistent transparency gap that fuels legal and political battles over these Israeli-linked technologies [2] [3] [8].