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 (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 draw inferences by fusing people’s publicly available data and might be used by ICE to “identify persons of interest and generate investigative leads.”
There are well-documented flaws, however, in the way AI crunches data and reproduces biases. Toh warned, “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 Shifting Mission
HSI’s mission has shifted during President Donald Trump’s second administration. The ICE division has long assisted in civil immigration enforcement, but its focus was primarily 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. “On January 20, President Trump signed an executive order directing HSI to make immigration enforcement its top priority.”
Nvidia 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 useful for ICE data analysis. The company holds a dominant position across machine learning and artificial intelligence fields, including platforms for running 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 (GPUs) housed in Nvidia-owned data centers. 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 likely to benefit from adopting the technology, including 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 states, adding that the system could also automatically scan and classify footage recorded by HSI agents.
A recently published inventory of how DHS is using artificial intelligence tools reveals other areas where ICE may use Nvidia’s “high-performance computing solutions.” The document, reflecting Homeland Security practices as of July, notes HSI employs 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 notes that 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 Expanding Enforcement Role
Procurement data about HSI’s use of Nvidia technology comes as ICE ramps up its presence in cities and towns across the U.S. Raids by ICE are increasingly viewed as extreme and unchecked by legal or policy constraints, provoking aggressive protests against immigrant enforcement.
HSI is playing a growing role in controversial enforcement and crackdowns on demonstrations. Since Trump’s executive order on HSI, said Reichlin-Melnick, “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 New Jersey lawmakers. Charges of trespassing against Baraka were later dismissed.
HSI’s activities go beyond street arrests and workplace raids. This week, 404 Media reported the agency was collecting utility customer data from Con Edison.
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This collaboration between Nvidia and ICE raises significant questions about privacy, civil liberties, and the ethical use of artificial intelligence in law enforcement. As the use of advanced technologies grows, transparency and oversight remain critical to ensure these tools do not infringe upon the rights of individuals or perpetuate systemic biases.
https://theintercept.com/2025/11/01/ice-nvidia-software-hsi-surveillance/