ICE Investigations, Powered by Nvidia

Nvidia, the computing giant that this week became the world’s first $5 trillion company, is powering U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s investigative division, according to federal records reviewed by The Intercept.

This summer, ICE renewed access to software tools for use by Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, an enforcement division previously tasked with transnational crime that has become increasingly common on American streets under the Trump administration.

The $19,000 transaction, according to federal procurement data, provided “Nvidia software licenses, which will be used by Homeland Security Investigations to enhance data analysis & improve investigative capabilities through high-performance computing solutions.”

“HSI’s growing investment in LLMs” — large language models — “suggests that it may be investing in systems that can be used to surveil U.S. citizens, migrants, and visitors,” said Amos Toh, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Large language models can be used to draw inference by fusing people’s publicly available data, and might be used by ICE to “to identify persons of interest and generate investigative leads.” There are well-documented flaws, however, in the way the AI crunches data and reproduces biases.

Toh said, “These problems make it more likely that people will be targeted based on flawed intelligence.”

In a statement, ICE said, “Like other law enforcement agencies, ICE employs various forms of technology to investigate criminal activity and support law enforcement efforts while respecting civil liberties and privacy interests.”

When asked whether Nvidia had any ability to ensure ICE was using its technology lawfully, company spokesperson John Rizzo told The Intercept, “Millions of U.S. consumers, businesses, and government agencies use general-purpose computers every day. We do not and cannot monitor the use of general-purpose computers by U.S. government employees.”

HSI’s mission has shifted during President Donald Trump’s second administration. The ICE division has long since assisted in civil immigration enforcement, but its focus was on criminal investigations such as drug smuggling and human trafficking.

“HSI has long sought to distance itself from ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations, which carries out basic immigration law enforcement,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told The Intercept. “On January 20, President Trump signed an executive order directing HSI to make immigration enforcement its top priority.”

Nvdia has been cozying up to Trump, who is threatening restrictions on chip exports to China, a lucrative market for the chipmaker. At a speech at a Nvidia tech conference in Washington on Tuesday, CEO Jensen Huang praised Trump and thanked those assembled “for your service and helping make America great again.”

How Nvidia Might Help ICE

How ICE plans to use Nvidia’s services is unclear; the specific software in question is not disclosed in the procurement documents.

Nvidia offers a variety of software-based services that could be useful for ICE data analysis. Nvidia has a dominant position across machine learning and artificial intelligence fields, including platforms to run large language models and video analytics.

The reseller through which ICE is buying access to Nvidia products, California-based New Tech Solutions, has previously sold the U.S. government licenses for “virtual workstations,” which essentially lease remote access to powerful chips known as graphics processing units, or GPUs, housed in data centers owned by Nvidia.

Such hardware could be used to train and query machine learning models. A 2023 report by the Department of Homeland Security on its potential usage of machine learning flagged HSI as standing to benefit from adopting the technology, including by rapidly searching and summarizing suspicious activity reports through large language models.

“HSI agents could quickly access and make sense of more than tens of millions of reports through ad hoc, unstructured queries over a voice interface,” the report says, adding that the system could also automatically scan and classify the contents of footage recorded by HSI agents.

A recently published inventory of ways DHS is using artificial intelligence tools reveals other areas where ICE may be able to make use of Nvidia’s “high-performance computing solutions.”

The document, which reflects Homeland Security practices as of July, notes HSI uses machine learning algorithms “to identify and extract critical evidence, relationships, and networks from mobile device data, leveraging machine learning capabilities to determine locations of interest.” The document also says HSI uses large language models to “identify the most relevant information in reports, accelerating investigative analysis by rapidly identifying persons of interest, surfacing trends, and detecting networks or fraud.”

HSI’s Shifting Mission

Procurement data about HIS’s use of Nvidia technology comes as ICE ramps up its presence in cities and towns across the U.S. Raids by ICE are viewed as being increasingly extreme and unchecked by legal or policy constraints, leading to aggressive protests against the immigrant enforcement.

HSI is playing a growing role in the controversial enforcement — and the crackdown on demonstrations.

Since Trump’s executive order on HSI, said Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council, “large numbers of agents have been reassigned away from criminal investigations to carry out immigration arrests instead.”

HSI agents in Washington have rounded up residents for minor traffic infractions and, earlier this month fired a gun into a man’s car. In June, HSI took part in the arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka outside an ICE facility he was scheduled to tour with a delegation of New Jersey lawmakers. Charges of trespassing against Baraka were later dismissed.

HSI’s activities, though, go beyond street arrests and workplace raids: This week, 404 Media reported the agency was collecting utility customer data from Con Edison.

Like most large tech firms, Nvidia’s claims it adheres to various international human rights frameworks, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which prohibits prejudice based on race or national origin.