The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has been rapidly building out its surveillance capabilities in recent weeks, signing a string of contracts for technologies to identify individuals by their irises or facial features and to monitor their cellphone activity, social media posts and physical movements, according to a review of federal spending disclosures.

The blitz of surveillance purchases is motivated in large part by ICE’s intensive, nationwide campaign to find and deport undocumented immigrants. But documents show that some of the technology may also be used to target what the administration regards as anti-ICE extremist groups. Late last month, President Donald Trump declared “Antifa” a domestic terrorist organization in the wake of violent clashes and a Dallas shooting at an ICE facility, ordering all federal agencies to devote resources to investigating what he defined as “a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law.”

Shortly after Trump’s executive order, ICE’s acting director, Todd M. Lyons, told Glenn Beck in an interview that the agency will deploy some of its elite investigative officers to probe anti-ICE protester networks. “We have some of the best special agents, criminal investigators,” Lyons said on Beck’s podcast. “We are going to track the money. We are going to track these ringleaders.”

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Technologies purchased by ICE in recent weeks include an iris-scanning app that agents plan to use in the field, spyware that can hack into smartphones remotely and cellphone location software that can enable the tracking of a phone’s movements without a court warrant.

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In early October, ICE also informed prospective vendors that it planned to set up a new social media monitoring hub to trawl platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp and TikTok to collect information on targets. The document identifies undocumented immigrants who have committed serious crimes as the primary focus but also deems domestic terrorism a top priority and says the contractor must be “flexible [about] shifting priorities.”

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A number of ICE’s surveillance orders this year are explicitly for immigration enforcement, such as a $30 million contract to Palantir to build ImmigrationOS, a platform for granularly tracking undocumented immigrants’ movements and any self-deportations. But U.S. officials have also begun to say that their efforts may serve the crackdown on antifa as well.

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The pinned post on ICE’s official Facebook page is a warning to the agency’s critics that they will “Face the Consequences” of long prison sentences if they assault or impede officers, cyberstalk, dox or make threats online.

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