ICE plans intel units in every field office to research immigrants, map who they know

ERO ONE would task them with researching individuals and charting their associates for the agents who carry out arrests and deportations.

Parker Coffman via Unsplash

A draft statement of work posted to the government's contracting clearing house would place 142 contract intelligence analysts inside 24 immigration enforcement field offices and three national targeting centers.

The posting, published on SAM.gov today, covers what Immigration and Customs Enforcement calls ERO ONE, short for Enforcement and Removal Operations Overwatch and National Security Enforcement.

The draft says the unit will support the collection, analysis and reporting of intelligence used to inform ERO activities with a nexus to “national security, public safety, officer safety” and detention-related work.

ERO ONE intelligence analysts would research and analyze information from classified and unclassified sources, evaluate it for reliability, and turn it into finished intelligence for ERO officers and supervisors.

The draft lists 11 task areas. They include supporting the agency's intelligence collection requirements, identifying trends and emerging threats, producing threat assessments and intelligence summaries, building link charts and network diagrams that map relationships among individuals, organizations, locations and events, identifying gaps in what the agency knows, and briefing findings to headquarters and field leadership.

Analysts assigned to field offices would work on cases within their region and coordinate with headquarters, other ICE components, other federal law enforcement agencies and members of the intelligence community. The draft also assigns them analytical support to operational planning, which it defines as background research, network analysis and briefing materials prepared before enforcement operations.

It would assign three to five analysts to each field office, from Boston and Buffalo to San Diego and Seattle, with the largest concentrations at headquarters in Washington and at the agency's targeting hubs.

Fifteen analysts would work at Potomac Center North, the Washington headquarters. Twelve would go to the National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center in Williston, Vt., and 12 more to the Law Enforcement Support Center in the same town. Nine more analysts would be assigned to the Pacific Enforcement Response Center, listed in the draft as Laguna Niguel, Calif. A project manager holding a top secret clearance would be based in Washington, separate from the 142 positions.

The Williston facilities have drawn fierce protests since October 2025, when federal contracting records showed the agency planned to hire contract workers there to expand surveillance to monitor social media to identify people for arrest and deportation. Vermont State Police arrested 13 people in July after protesters blocked the entrances, and arrested or cited 13 more in February.

Analysts would need a bachelor's degree or four additional years of experience, plus eight years of professional analytical work.

ICE says in the draft that it will not grant clearances to contract employees and will accept only workers who already hold them. That leaves the contractor to find 142 cleared analysts and place them in 27 cities.

The draft repeatedly bars contractors themselves from selecting enforcement targets, deciding whether enforcement action occurs, or making final threat determinations. The statement says those functions remain government responsibilities. It also assigns contractors analytical support to operational planning.

ICE already collects or buys most of the information the analysts would work from, according to contracting records and documents obtained by Project Salt Box. The agency has asked vendors for access to cellphone location data drawn from mobile advertising and buys commercial facial recognition and web-scraping tools. It pays private firms up to $1 billion to use open source intelligence to locate individuals, and obtains state driver and vehicle records through an automated law enforcement network.

The government has said it expects to spend more than $100 million on the contract.

It will release a formal solicitation by Dec. 10 and award the work in the spring of 2027.