Babel Street — Location Data & Social Media Surveillance for ICE

Babel Street provides ICE with location surveillance and social media monitoring tools. Since 2018, ICE has entered contracts totaling approximately $2.5 million for Babel Street software, though this figure likely understates current spending given ICE’s 2025-2026 surveillance expansion.

Key Products

Locate X

Locate X uses location data harvested from mobile phone applications. Using Locate X, ICE can:

Monitor cell phones crossing specific locations (e.g., a church, courthouse, or known address)
Learn where those phones had been before crossing those locations
Track where they travel afterward

This effectively provides ICE with warrantless location surveillance by purchasing commercially available “bid-stream” data from the advertising technology ecosystem rather than obtaining a warrant.

Babel X

Babel X gathers sweeping amounts of data from a single identifier such as a name, email, or phone number. It can access:

Social media posts
IP addresses
Employment history
Unique advertising IDs (used to trace device location)

CBP has used Babel X since at least 2019.

The Ad-Tech Surveillance Pipeline

Babel Street (along with Venntel/Gravy Analytics) exploits the advertising technology ecosystem to obtain location data. When a phone app requests location permission for advertising purposes, that data enters the “bid-stream” – the real-time advertising auction system. Data brokers intercept this data and repackage it for government surveillance. No warrant is required because the data is commercially available.

In January 2026, ICE posted a request for information explicitly referencing “ad tech” for the first time in federal procurement documents, signaling further expansion of this surveillance method.

Amnesty International Report (August 2025)

Amnesty International documented that Babel Street’s technology poses surveillance threats not only to immigrants but also to pro-Palestine student protesters, noting the tools’ capacity for broad population monitoring.

Detention Pipeline