Does AT&T have contracts with DHS/ICE? What about Verizon?
Executive summary
AT&T currently holds multi‑year, multimillion‑dollar contracts to provide mission‑critical communications services to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), a relationship the company and watchdogs tie directly to DHS components including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in some task orders [1] [2] [3]. Reporting shows Verizon was a principal DHS provider historically and is named in contemporary summaries as holding comparable awards, but the sources here do not clearly document a current Verizon contract for ICE of the same form or duration as AT&T’s 10‑year award [4] [3].
1. AT&T’s documented DHS contracts and the ICE connection
AT&T announced a 10‑year, $146 million contract to supply Government Emergency Telecommunications Service (GETS) and Wireless Priority Service (WPS) for DHS in 2024, and the company frames this as part of a decades‑long federal relationship [1]; independent trackers and investigative groups report that AT&T has accumulated hundreds of millions in DHS awards since the early 2000s, with figures cited as more than $680 million through August 2024 [2]. Multiple DHS task orders assigned to AT&T explicitly cover provisioning and network services that include ICE among the covered components, and press reporting from 2021 documents AT&T replacing Verizon on several DHS enterprise infrastructure task orders that listed ICE among the agencies served [3] [5]. Lawyers and watchdogs interpret those task orders and FirstNet/communications integrations as meaning AT&T’s network work directly supports ICE operational communications, though contract language ranges from agency‑wide DHS services to component‑specific task orders [3] [2].
2. What the sources say about Verizon
Verizon appears in the reporting as both a historic DHS provider and a peer competitor to AT&T for government task orders: a news summary stated Verizon “did the same” with a DHS contract valued at $176 million in the same reporting that highlighted AT&T’s $146 million award, and trade reporting from 2021 recounts Verizon as DHS’s prior primary network provider before AT&T’s task orders migrated services [4] [3]. That establishes Verizon’s past and recent role supplying DHS communications, but the assembled sources do not provide a current, detailed public record in these snippets showing a contemporaneous Verizon ICE contract identical in length or scope to AT&T’s 10‑year, $146M award [4] [3].
3. ICE‑specific procurements and third‑party suppliers — context and scale
ICE continues to procure a variety of IT, cybersecurity, and surveillance tools through multiple contractors: public contract trackers and legal‑advocacy summaries list ICE task orders for cyber defense, tactical communications, device‑unlocking tools, and software from vendors such as CACI, Dell Federal, Cellebrite/Magnet Forensics and others, with awards ranging from millions to over a hundred million depending on scope [6] [7] [8]. Some reporting estimates ICE‑specific obligations tied to background investigations and visa support in the single‑digit millions annually and cites a separate ICE cyber defense award potentially worth tens of millions — illustrating that ICE’s vendor ecosystem is broad and not monopolized by a single carrier [7] [6].
4. Protest movement, corporate defense, and reporting limits
Activist groups and community protests in Chicago and Evanston explicitly target AT&T for doing business with DHS/ICE, demanding the contracts be dropped and publicizing boycotts; those campaigns cite AT&T’s own press release and contract values as the basis for their pressure campaigns [9] [10] [11]. AT&T defends the work as mission‑critical emergency communications support, while watchdogs warn that carrier and tech contracts enable surveillance and enforcement capacities [1] [8]. The reporting assembled here documents AT&T’s DHS contract and shows Verizon’s historical DHS role, but does not provide a comprehensive, line‑item federal procurement database dump to definitively list every active Verizon–ICE award at this moment; that gap limits any categorical statement that Verizon currently has identical ICE contracts to AT&T without additional contract data queries [4] [3] [7].