“One Ring to Rule Them All”:

The Weaponization of ICE

  • The detention and deportation of undocumented migrants has become both a law enforcement and a national security priority for the United States.
  • This is reflected in the massive amounts of funding and other resources being diverted from other agencies and allotted to ICE and DHS.
  • Canadian agencies may find their relationships with US counterparts adversely affected, especially in terms of cross border cooperation and investigative coordination.
  • Personal and proprietary information belonging to Canadian citizens, residents and institutions are vulnerable to the long reach of next-generation US case management systems currently being developed for ICE and other US government agencies.

Racking Them Up…

Since taking office for the second time, President Donald J. Trump has wasted no time in fulfilling his promise to make the deportation of the estimated 11.7 undocumented migrants in the United States a priority of his administration. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which falls under the jurisdiction of Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, has aggressively targeted non-citizens (many of whom are, in fact, legal residents of the United States) for detention and deportation, sometimes using obscure criminal legislation, like the Enemy Aliens Act of 1789. It should be noted that, under US law, undocumented migration is, in most cases, a civil, rather than a criminal, offence.

…And Knocking Them Down

ICE is arresting and detaining about 1,100 people a day, up from about 700 when Trump took office. Stephen Miller, the president’s deputy chief of staff, has stated that agency’s target should be in the 3,000 a day range. “Operation At Large,” the massive ICE crackdown that began in early June, involves not only 3,000 ICE agents, but also 2,000 other law enforcement personnel from the FBI, the US Marshals Service, and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Increasingly, the focus of American federal law enforcement is undocumented migrants, apparently to the exclusion of almost everything else.

Redefining Citizenship…And Security

The administration has also taken a series of steps to reshape American immigration policy, up to and including the revocation of jus soli, or “birthright citizenship;” serious discussion of the possibility of deporting naturalized and natural-born Americans; and the termination of the legal status of the million or so refugees and other protected persons in the country. This is being done largely through executive orders and policy memoranda, often in a way that seems calculated to circumvent constitutionally mandated procedures for creating federal statute and legislation. The apparent weaponization of ICE, meanwhile, is the acceleration of a process that began in the aftermath of 9/11, when the responsibilities of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, ICE’s predecessor agency, were moved to the jurisdiction of the newly created DHS. This effectively transformed immigration in the United States from a policing and settlement issue, into a national security problem.

Big Law Enforcement

On July 4, Independence Day, the US immigration enforcement infrastructure received a massive boost with the passage of a federal budget reconciliation act known as the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB). OBBB allocates a total of $170 billion to migration and border-related issues. $45 billion of that total is earmarked to expand detention capacity (like the “Alligator Alcatraz” camp in the Florida Everglades) and $30 billion is allocated to ICE operations. This effectively gives the agency a budget that exceeds the annual military spending of Israel and Switzerland, two countries that tend not to economize on defense. ICE is now better funded than the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Marshals Service, and the Bureau of Prisons combined. As above, however, the ICE role is not exclusively criminal law enforcement. To date, few of the people caught up in ICE dragnets appear to be truly criminals. ICE agents may target anybody without recourse to the standards of evidence and reasonable and probable grounds adhered to by FBI agents and other police and law enforcement officers. 

The Palantir Factor

Another factor in the acceleration of ICE operations is the agency’s $30 million sole-source contract with Palantir Technologies, founded by Trump donor and J.D. Vance mentor, Peter Thiel, to develop its next generation investigative case management system, or ICMS (the name, Palantir, is borrowing from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and refers to an all-seeing crystal orb that instils in its possessor the powers of a deity).  The ICMS will build upon existing Palantir systems already in place within ICE and DHS and will employ generative AI to organize, manipulate and analyze large numbers of biometric, lifestyle, behavioural, and transactional data points to identify and track undocumented migrants and other ICE targets.

Why Do We Care?

While conclusive data is not yet available, the expansion of ICE operations may push undocumented migrants in the United States to seek refuge in Canada. While there are few options open to them in this country, Canadian border officials may see increased numbers of panicked people attempting to enter the country from the United States, either by claiming refugee / asylum status, or by lying about their intentions. This has the potential to cause significant disruption, especially given the level of desperation at play here. 

Attempted illegal crossings of the Canadian border are also likely to increase, whether at places like Roxham Road, Akwesasne, and the Lower Mainland’s Zero Avenue, or in remote areas adjoining New England and the 49th parallel. Aside from the pressure on federal agencies, like the RCMP and CBSA, this will have an impact on local authorities and municipalities, which will be dealing with everything from basic law enforcement and public order issues to the trauma associated with the deaths of migrants from exposure, drowning, and so on. 

The Palantir-built ICMS is projected to be fully online by this fall, accelerated by the tremendous infusion of OBBB funding into ICE. As the database becomes ever more granular, the US government may bring increasing pressure to bear on Canadian institutions – from banks, to hospitals, to online retailers – to provide data on undocumented migrants with links to Canada. There is a precedent for this: under the 2017 Intergovernmental Agreement for the Enhanced Exchange of Financial Account Information, Canadian banks are obliged to hand over financial information on their American clients to the US Internal Revenue Service. 

The role of Palantir data storage, management, and analysis systems, not only within ICE but other US federal law enforcement agencies as well, raises serious questions around the ethics of giving a single private sector entity (with links to the administration) effective control over vast quantities of data. Without highly specific guidelines and protocols (which this administration may choose to ignore) any Canadian information shared with specific US law enforcement or regulatory agencies could become part of a much larger “data haul.” Canadian data could then in turn be used to track undocumented migrants in the United States, possibly implicating peripherally involved Canadian citizens and residents in investigations and criminal proceedings. 

Finally, the transformation of ICE into America’s “mega” law enforcement agency, and the ultimate “national securitization” of immigration matters will affect cross-border investigations and prosecutions. Canadian law enforcement and intelligence agencies rely on their US counterparts at every level for assistance, information-sharing, and operational coordination. As funding, resourcing and staffing allocations increasingly tilt towards ICE and DHS, the ability of US agencies to engage with us in any substantive way may be seriously eroded. If so, this will exacerbate a whole range of cross-border issues, including fentanyl trafficking, which the US administration has used as its justification for imposing tariffs on Canada.  

This assessment is based on information available as of 1200 EDT, July 9, 2025