The Department of Homeland Securities’ ever-growing Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency intends to expand its high-tech toolkit in limiting illegal border crossings, according to two new published reports.
The agency, flush with $150 billion in funding from President Donald Trump’s megabill as part of a mass deportation agenda over the next four years, is asking tech companies to come up with ideas for a digital forensics tool that would let it process and analyze data from seized phones and computers and potentially uncover “hidden” patterns, reports Wired.
At the same time, CBP officials are tinkering with an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot called chatCBP capable of “document summarization, compilation, information extraction, and multi-file analysis, reducing the time spent searching for and interpreting documents,” an agency spokesperson told FedScoop. (An agency rep insisted the chatbot is not intended to replace federal workers, but augment their work.)
Taken together, the efforts signal a wider collaboration with the tech industry at a time when the government is doling out more AI-and defense-related contracts to the industry.
While CBP in general wants a digital-forensics tool to scan text messages, pictures, videos, contacts, and other information stored on devices seized from people at U.S. borders, it seeks a tool that can find patterns within those devices that signify hidden secrets, according to a federal registry listing from June.
Specifically, the agency wants to be able to detect “hidden language” in text messages such as coded terms that “may not be obvious at first look.” It also wants to be able to identify objects within videos and photos, and quickly process that data for “intel generation.”
CBP, which currently uses tools from Israeli intelligence firm Cellebrite to scan devices, is in search of “a wide variety of digital data extraction tools,” Wired reported.
As the agency seizes more devices from people in its escalating oversight of the border, it is seeking more sophisticated tools. Last year, it performed 4,200 “advanced” searches, which include a digital forensic deep dive into a device. In 2023, it searched 41,500 devices, compared with 8,500 devices in 2015, according to the agency’s data.
The latest actions by CBP offer even more evidence of its efforts to use technology to assist the federal government’s crackdown on immigration, which includes crossings into the U.S.
In recent weeks, news has surfaced of several CBP efforts. In May, the agency told Wired it plans to log every person leaving the country by vehicle by taking photos at border crossings of every passenger and matching their faces to their passports, visas, or travel documents. To that end, the agency has asked tech companies to send pitches on how they would ensure every single person entering the country by vehicle, including people two or three rows back, would be instantly photographed and matched with their travel documents. CBP has struggled to do this on its own.
In April, ICE said it is paying Palantir $30 million to build a tool called ImmigrationOS that would give the agency “near real-time visibility” on people self-deporting from the U.S., with the goal of having accurate numbers on how many people are doing so, according to a contract justification published in April.
