The company’s biometric tech always sounded like it was ripped from the plot of a dystopian thriller, but recently, the iris-scanning system developed by the Massachusetts-based BI² Technologies has become part of the nation’s deportation dragnet.
How BI² landed an ICE contract worth as much as $10 million is in part a tale of the Trump administration’s increasing reliance on controversial surveillance and biometric technology in its immigration crackdown. But it’s also the story of how a lobbying shop with deep ties to Trumpworld helped land a lucrative deal for a company that for years had struggled to break into federal contracting.
Shortly after President Donald Trump’s election, BI² hired Ballard Partners to tout its tech to the right people in Washington. The lobbying firm was about as close as you could get to the Trump administration. Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, helped open Ballard’s DC office. Attorney General Pam Bondi is a Ballard alum. And the firm’s founder, Brian Ballard, a Trump whisperer with unparalleled entree to the president’s inner circle, was part of the team working on the BI² account.
In August, Ballard’s lobbying paid off when ICE handed BI² a no-bid award for its Inmate Recognition and Identification System, saying it would give agents the “capability to quickly and accurately identify individuals encountered during ICE operations.” Equipped with an iris-scanning mobile app called MORIS, ICE agents can query the IRIS database, which contains some 5 million biometric records.
BI² executives have long seen opportunities in immigration enforcement. During the first Trump administration, the company offered all 31 county sheriffs along the US-Mexico border free use of IRIS for three years. In 2017, a BI² investor tried to broker a meeting between its CEO and an adviser to then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions, according to the Intercept. And in 2020, the company hired the Ervin Graves Strategy Group to lobby the Justice Department and DHS, which oversees ICE. But its efforts to crack the federal market didn’t pan out, and about two weeks after Trump’s defeat, BI² cut ties with Ervin Graves.
BI² sat on the sidelines of the influence game during the Biden administration before signing on with Ballard, which represents corporate clients ranging from Amazon to the NFL. Indeed, dozens of companies have flocked to the firm as they seek to navigate—and cash in on—the second Trump administration. Ballard notched $34 million in lobbying income for the first half of this year, smashing its previous record haul of $24.1 million—for the entirety of 2020. BI² has paid Ballard more than $200,000 to date. (Neither firm responded to our questions.)
Ballard’s disclosures show that promoting the IRIS technology to DHS has been the sole focus of its advocacy for BI² and that BI² isn’t the firm’s only biometrics client that has scored a no-bid ICE contract. Virginia-based SNA International, founded after 9/11 to identify the victims of mass fatalities, retained Ballard in March to lobby DHS and the White House on “Government agencies DNA testing.” In May, ICE awarded SNA a contract worth up to $25 million to test the DNA of immigrant families, in what critics say could lay the groundwork for separating children from caregivers who are not blood relatives. “DHS will continue to expand the use of DNA testing, along with many other investigative tools to ensure that our borders are secure and that all human trafficking is annihilated,” a DHS spokesperson said, but declined to discuss Ballard’s lobbying.
The Trump administration has shown a deep interest in integrating cutting-edge technology into its crackdown. In April, ICE announced it would pay another Ballard client, Palantir—co-founded by GOP megadonor Peter Thiel—$30 million to deliver its ImmigrationOS surveillance platform, designed to give the agency “near real-time data” on targets. Per 404 Media, ICE also is piloting a facial recognition app called Mobile Fortify that can match photographs against some 200 million images stored in government databases.
Privacy advocates and civil libertarians have long raised concerns about “facial profiling” systems like BI²’s. Such fears have only grown more pointed as the Trump administration mines immigration data from sources that were previously off-limits, such as IRS and Medicaid records, and as it expands the use of biometric technology for border security and immigration policing. “Like other law enforcement agencies, ICE employs various forms of technology while respecting civil liberties and privacy interests,” the DHS spokesperson said.
The perils of all of this extend beyond mere immigration, privacy experts warn. The growing surveillance infrastructure could be “deployed by an authoritarian executive to coerce and control the US population at scale,” as Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology reported in May. “It is a mistake,” the center noted, “to think about what the Trump administration is doing now as ‘immigration enforcement.’ Trump is using immigration powers as the vehicle for the activities of his militarized police force.” And Ballard and its clients are reaping the financial rewards.
This story was reported with the Project on Government Oversight.
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