ICE bought vehicles equipped with fake cell towers to spy on phones

ICE as Law Enforcement vs Paramilitary

• Some argue ICE now operates as a de facto paramilitary or secret police: masked, heavily armed raids, helicopter-supported motorcades, zip-tying children, and dragnet operations that allegedly sweep up citizens and damage property.
• Others push back that it remains a federal law-enforcement agency “simply enforcing immigration law,” and that calling it illegal/paramilitary is rhetorical overreach.
• Several examples are cited (e.g., Chicago apartment raid, deportations allegedly in defiance of court orders) as evidence ICE is exceeding lawful authority and targeting citizens, not just undocumented people.

Legality, Constitutionality, and Due Process

• One side claims most of what ICE does is formally legal, enabled by Congress, Supreme Court rulings (e.g., on “reasonable suspicion” using ethnic/geographic factors), and doctrines like congressional “plenary power” over immigration.
• Others counter that legality is being stretched or abandoned: mass raids without individualized probable cause, ignoring state laws and federal court orders, and detaining citizens without meaningful access to counsel or clear records.
• Strong debate over whether non‑citizens have full 5th/14th Amendment protections in practice, and whether deportation is a deprivation of liberty requiring robust due process.
• Several commenters distinguish “legal but wrong” from “illegal,” but many insist large parts of current practice violate the 4th Amendment and due process guarantees.

Cell-Site Simulators vs Lawful Intercept

• Commenters note Stingrays/IMSI catchers have long been used by police; what’s new is their deployment by ICE vehicles and the agency’s broader conduct.
• There’s disagreement on technical capability: some doubt easy LTE/5G content interception; others say 2G downgrades and SS7 access can still expose identifiers and possibly traffic.
• A major question: why not use official lawful-intercept interfaces? Proposed answers: avoiding warrants, probable cause, minimization rules, and paper trails that could create criminal or civil liability.
• Parallel construction is raised: data from illegal taps can be laundered into cases via alternative “official” sources, making the original surveillance hard to challenge.

Likely Surveillance Goals

• Several speculate ICE may primarily be cataloging IMSIs/IMEIs and tracking movement patterns (e.g., protestors, “agitators”) rather than routinely intercepting call content.
• Such metadata could be combined with commercially available location/RTB data to build cases later, while staying just below the formal “wiretap” threshold. This is presented as plausible but not confirmed.

User Countermeasures and Technical Limits

• Suggested defenses:
  • Disable 2G on Android; use iOS Lockdown Mode (which also disables 2G/3G but significantly degrades UX).
  • Use tools like EFF’s Rayhunter and CellGuard to detect rogue base stations, acknowledging detection is often “too late” for that device but can map large-scale abuse.
  • Use privacy-focused Android ROMs, FOSS apps, firewalls, Bluetooth tracker detectors, and Faraday pouches.
• Others warn that BLE-based “Find My” networks and always-on basebands can still reveal presence, even when phones appear off.

Budget, Effectiveness, and Political Context

• ICE’s budget expansion under recent legislation is widely described as “absurdly large,” rivaling or exceeding many national defense budgets.
• Some see a voter “mandate” to reduce illegal immigration for economic and perceived-fairness reasons; others call that mandate weak and driven more by racialized politics than economics.
• Multiple comments argue ICE is spending vastly more than prior administrations to achieve similar or only slightly improved deportation and border-crossing numbers, implying corruption, incompetence, or a shift toward political intimidation and domestic policing rather than efficient immigration enforcement.