ICE has also purchased at least one “customized” training session for staff on using Microsoft Teams. Details on FPDS revealed that the training would be focused on developing “documents” for the management office of the 287(g) program, which deputizes enrolled state and local agencies to work with ICE. “Automated documents” are also mentioned, but nothing on FPDS reveals exactly what those may be, or what role they play in the 287(g) program.
Christopher Muhawe, an assistant professor of law at the University of Illinois Chicago—who has studied the psychological effects the American immigration surveillance infrastructure—argues that people seeking asylum or refugee status in the US, including the “security and survival” it could provide, are “inherently vulnerable” to the federal immigration surveillance state, and can cause anxiety and “advanced harm to someone’s health.”
“There are no adequate protections to these individuals,” Muhawe says.
Microsoft did not return WIRED’s request for comment.
Amazon
Both CBP and ICE use Amazon cloud storage in support of their operations.
Federal payment records reveal that ICE is a customer of Amazon’s “GovCloud,” a version of AWS that the company says has heightened security specifications for “sensitive workloads.” According to a slide presentation uploaded to SAM, the federal award management system, in July 2023, Palantir’s ICM runs on AWS.
The same document says that Amazon also powers “ICE Cloud,” a crucial piece of infrastructure for the agency. ICE Cloud hosts the agency’s “Digital Records Manager,” “Data Warehouse,” and the “Law Enforcement Information Sharing Service” (LEIS Service), according to the 2023 slide presentation. DHS described the LEIS Service in 2019 as “a backend super highway data sharing system” between ICE and other law enforcement agencies.
The 2023 slide presentation shows that ICE Cloud also hosts the “PRIME Interface Hub,” which DHS says “transmits queries to and from” two other locations. The first is ICE’s Enforcement Integrated Database, which DHS says contains “investigation, arrest, booking, detention, and removal” records for people encountered or apprehended by ICE, CBP, or US Citizenship and Immigration Services. The second is “TECS” (which DHS says is not currently an acronym, but once stood for the “Treasury Enforcement Communications System”), CBP’s “information-sharing platform” that allows authorized users to access CBP databases with information about anyone who entered the US by plane, ship, car, or on foot, and any assets seized at the border.
Amazon also powers ICE’s “Student and Exchange Visitor Program Automated Information Management System,” according to a September 2025 transaction. This appears to be either a functionality within, or another term for, the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, which stores information about people studying in the US.
Two FPDS payments—despite being made in 2020 and 2022, prior to the period WIRED examined—are significant enough to warrant mention. They revealed that Amazon was providing infrastructure for the ICE’s Repository for Analytics in a Virtualized Environment (RAVEn), a tool for agents to analyze “raw or unevaluated datasets”—including documents, photos, audio, and other data—over a dozen federal databases. A DHS Office of the Inspector General report from 2023 describes RAVEn as an “internally developed” tool. It includes a primary “search and analytic tool,” a tool for sharing “lead referrals and outcomes” across HSI field offices, and a mobile app.
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