Here’s How ICE Will Use Israeli Spyware

The Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency has been in the midst of a particularly large crackdown on immigrants under the leadership of Trump-appointed homeland security secretary Kristi Noem.

Now the agency has Israeli spyware to turbocharge its efforts.

ICE first signed a $2 million contract with spyware firm Paragon in late 2024 under the Biden administration. 

But that contract was blocked until a compliance review could determine whether it adhered to an executive order signed by President Biden in 2023 that restricts government use of commercial spyware.

Since then, the Israeli spyware maker has been bought by Florida-based private equity firm AE Industrial Partners in a $500 million deal. 

The pause on that deal is now lifted, according to public procurement documents first reported on by All-Source Intelligence on Substack. 

The news comes as the Trump administration ramps up its policy of mass deportations and ICE raids, after the President vowed to enact the “largest deportation” in U.S. history on the campaign trail. 

Criticism was swift to follow the news.

“Paragon’s technology has been misused by other governments around the world to target human rights defenders and political dissidents alike,” Michael De Dora, U.S. policy manager for digital rights group Access Now told the Washington Post. “Americans should be deeply concerned about how the administration could use this new tool for the purposes of domestic repression, and the administration should be very careful too.”

Neither Paragon nor ICE responded to a request for comment from Gizmodo.

What is Paragon?

Paragon is a spyware firm founded in 2019 by former IDF intelligence officers, with the help of investor and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. In January 2024, former CIA director John Finbarr Fleming became executive chairman of the company, according to his LinkedIn profile. 

In late 2024, Paragon’s acquisition by an American private equity firm was announced and the company is now based in Virginia.

The company has been involved in lobbying efforts in Washington, DC to appease American lawmakers since 2019, when it enlisted the help of a consulting firm cofounded by former Obama administration officials and former U.S. secretary of state Anthony Blinken. 

It’s unsure how ICE will use Paragon’s services, but the company’s key product is a spyware called Graphite that can be used to hack into a user’s phone to view data, open encrypted applications like Signal, and even use the phone as a listening device.

Paragon’s products draw criticism from human rights organizations for their use against journalists and political dissidents. Earlier this year, the Italian government was exposed to have been using Paragon’s products to spy on journalists and migrant rights activists.

The company reportedly cut all ties with the Italian government following the news.

Meta-owned WhatsApp sent Paragon a cease-and-desist letter earlier this year after saying that it had disrupted a spyware campaign that targeted journalists.

Only a month before that, WhatsApp won a lawsuit against NSO Group, another Israeli spyware company and Paragon’s competitor, after NSO Group installed malware on the phones of more than a thousand diplomats, human rights activists, attorneys, journalists and more.

ICE’s mass surveillance is now turbocharged

ICE has been in the midst of amplifying its deportation efforts with technology, thanks to Trump’s “big beautiful bill” that has allocated billions in funding for the agency.

In April, Department of Homeland Security said that it would start monitoring the social media accounts of immigrants for “anti-semitism” in an effort to purge immigrants that criticize the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza.

In August, Noem said that she wants to buy planes dedicated to deportations, in what would be a highly unusual move for the agency, while an internal report from July revealed that the agency wanted to track hundreds of thousands of immigrants with ankle monitors. 

The CEO of ICE contractor and private prison company Geo Group shared in an earnings call last year that Republicans had previously floated the idea of monitoring seven million immigrants in the U.S. with some form of monitoring including cellphone surveillance, Gizmodo previously reported.

It seems like the agency may have decided on a way to do that.