No Accident in Williston: ICE's Bid to Supercharge Social Media Surveillance from Vermont's Hidden Enforcement Hub
ICE does not build this surveillance machine alone. Its capabilities are powered by a symbiotic relationship with a sprawling ecosystem of private technology companies and data brokers.
A recent proposal by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to hire a team of social media surveillance contractors in a Williston office park is not the beginning of a story, but the next chapter in one. What’s being planned is not a new capability, but a significant escalation of a controversial, technology-driven enforcement strategy that has deep roots in Vermont and across the nation.
The plan, outlined in a federal Request for Information (RFI), seeks to hire at least a dozen private analysts to work around the clock inside ICE’s National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center (NCATC). Their job would be to scour social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter), along with vast commercial and government databases, to generate leads for deportations.
To fully understand what this proposal means for Vermont, one must look beyond the initial headlines. This isn’t just about a new contract; it’s about industrializing a form of surveillance the government has already used in the state, bolstering a national data hub already operating in our backyard, and deepening partnerships with a powerful corporate surveillance industry.
Williston: A National Nerve Center for ICE
ICE’s presence in Williston is no accident. The Chittenden County town is home to two distinct but complementary facilities that form a powerful national hub for data-driven immigration enforcement.
The National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center (NCATC), where the new social media analysts would work, is the agency’s proactive intelligence-gathering arm. According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), its mission is to generate leads on individuals who may be subject to deportation, which are then passed to field offices for arrest. It is, in effect, a national targeting center.
Just down the road is the Law Enforcement Support Center (LESC). This is a 24/7 reactive hub. According to ICE, it serves as the agency’s national point of contact for federal, state, and local police. When an officer anywhere in the country makes a traffic stop and suspects they’ve encountered an undocumented person, they call the LESC in Williston for a real-time status check.
Together, these two facilities create a powerful enforcement loop. A local police interaction in another state can trigger a query to the LESC in Vermont, creating a record. That record can then become a lead for the co-located NCATC to investigate. The proposed social media surveillance team is designed to be a massive accelerant for this cycle, allowing analysts to instantly build a detailed digital dossier on a target and their network of friends and family.
Vermont’s History: A Precedent for Surveillance
For many in Vermont, fears about ICE surveillance are not hypothetical. They are grounded in a recent, well-documented history of the agency targeting local immigrant rights advocates.
In 2018, the ACLU of Vermont filed a federal lawsuit against ICE and DHS on behalf of Migrant Justice, a prominent advocacy group for undocumented farmworkers. The lawsuit alleged that in response to the group’s successful organizing—a protected First Amendment activity—ICE engaged in a multi-year campaign of retaliatory surveillance and targeted arrests against its leaders and members.
Court filings and supporting documents detailed a range of tactics, including the use of an informant, attempts to hack email accounts, and, specifically, “social media data mining” to track the activists. The lawsuit alleged that ICE labeled non-criminal community leaders as “high-profile targets.”
The case also revealed disturbing collaboration with the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). According to public records obtained for the lawsuit, DMV officials systematically shared private information from applicants for the state’s Driver’s Privilege Card with ICE agents. Emails showed state employees using racist language to describe applicants and, in some cases, coordinating with ICE to facilitate arrests.
This history is the essential context for the current proposal. The plan to expand social media surveillance in Williston is alarming to civil liberties advocates precisely because it would give ICE a more powerful, scalable tool to replicate the very kind of targeting it was sued for in the past. The plan’s stated goal of monitoring not just targets but their “associates” directly mirrors the past practice of mapping the social networks of Migrant Justice members. The lawsuit was eventually settled, with the government agreeing to instruct agents not to target people for exercising their First Amendment rights.
The Corporate Partners Behind the Curtain
ICE does not build this surveillance machine alone. Its capabilities are powered by a symbiotic relationship with a sprawling ecosystem of private technology companies and data brokers. This privatization of surveillance allows the government to acquire massive amounts of personal data that might otherwise require a warrant if collected directly.
Palantir Technologies: Perhaps ICE’s most crucial technology partner, the data analytics firm co-founded by Peter Thiel built the agency’s core data-fusion platforms. According to reporting from The Guardian and the American Immigration Council, Palantir was awarded a contract worth over $30 million to build a next-generation, AI-driven platform called “ImmigrationOS”. Contracting documents state its purpose is to streamline the entire “immigration lifecycle from identification to removal.”
Data Brokers: The RFI for the Williston analysts specifies the use of “powerful online commercial...databases.” This refers to data brokers like Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis. ICE pays these companies millions for access to their products, which aggregate vast collections of personal information, including utility bills, phone records, credit information, property records, and DMV data from across the country, according to reports from Mijente and Privacy International. By purchasing this pre-packaged data, the agency can often bypass the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement under a legal concept known as the “Third-Party Doctrine.”
This model creates a constitutional workaround. Instead of the government needing to justify a search, it simply buys a person’s digital life history on the open market.
The Constitutional Stakes
This expansion of surveillance operates in a gray area of the law, posing fundamental challenges to civil liberties that affect everyone, not just immigrants.
First, there is the chilling effect on free speech. Knowing the government is monitoring online activity can cause people—both immigrants and U.S. citizens—to self-censor. They may become afraid to criticize government policy, join an activist group, or associate with certain people for fear that an analyst or an algorithm will misinterpret their activity.
Second, it challenges the modern meaning of privacy. While a single public post is not private, civil liberties groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation argue that the government’s aggregation of a person’s entire digital footprint—every post, location tag, and online connection over years—is so intrusive it should be considered a “search” requiring a warrant.
Finally, the increasing reliance on “black box” algorithms threatens the right to due process. AI systems like “ImmigrationOS” can flag people for deportation based on opaque logic. An individual may never know what data caused them to be labeled a “threat,” making it nearly impossible to challenge the decision. These systems also risk amplifying existing biases, cloaking discriminatory enforcement in the perceived objectivity of technology.
This expansion of surveillance is a bipartisan trend. While formalized under the Trump administration, social media vetting programs have continued and grown under the Biden administration, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. The result is a system of “digital borders” that replaces the legal standard of “probable cause” with a new, troubling standard of “algorithmic suspicion.” The proposal in Williston is a clear signal of this future—one that demands robust public scrutiny and oversight.