ICE also purchased at least one “personalized” training session for staff on the employ of Microsoft Teams. Details about the FPDS revealed that the training would focus on developing “documents” for the 287(g) program management office, which delegates registered state and local agencies to work with ICE. There is also mention of “automated documents,” but nothing about FPDS indicates exactly what these documents might be or what role they play in the 287(g) program.
Christopher Muhawe, assistant professor of law at the University of Illinois at Chicago – who studied psychological effects of the U.S. immigration surveillance infrastructure – argues that people seeking asylum or refugee status in the U.S., including the “safety and survival” it can provide, are “inherently vulnerable” to the federal immigration surveillance state and can cause distress and “serious harm to one’s health.”
“These people do not have adequate protection,” says Muhawe.
Microsoft did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Amazon
Both CBP and ICE employ Amazon cloud storage to support their operations.
Federal payments records reveal that ICE is a customer of Amazon’s “GovCloud” service, a version AWS, which the company says has tighter security specifications for “sensitive workloads.” According to A slide presentation submitted to SAM, the federal rewards management system, in July 2023. Palantir’s ICM runs on AWS.
The same document said Amazon also operates the “ICE Cloud,” a key piece of the agency’s infrastructure. According to the 2023 slide deck, ICE Cloud supports “Digital Records Manager”, “Data Warehouse” and “Law Enforcement Information Sharing Service” (LEIS Service). DHS described LEIS service in 2019 as the “back-end superhighway data exchange system” between ICE and other law enforcement agencies.
A slideshow from 2023 shows that ICE Cloud also includes a “PRIME Interface Hub” that DHS says “transfers queries to and from” two other locations. The first is ICE’s integrated law enforcement database, what DHS says includes “investigation, arrest, booking, detention, and removal” provisions for individuals encountered or detained by ICE, CBP, or U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The second one is “TECS” (which DHS says is not currently an acronym, but once stood for “Treasury Enforcement Communications System”), CBP’s “information sharing platform” which allows authorized users access to CBP databases containing information on all persons who entered the U.S. by plane, ship, car or foot, as well as any assets confiscated at the border.
Amazon also operates ICE’s “automated student and exchange visitor program information management system.” According to to a September 2025 transaction. This appears to be either system functionality or another term for a student and exchange visitor information system that stores information about people studying in the US.
The two FPDS payments – although made in 2020 and 2022, before the period covered by the WIRED study – are significant enough to merit mention. They revealed that Amazon provides infrastructure for the ICE repository for analytics in a virtual environment (RAVen), tools for agents to analyze “raw or unreviewed datasets” – including documents, photos, audio recordings and other data – from more than a dozen federal databases. 2023 DHS Office of Inspector General Report describes RAVEn as an “in-house developed” tool. It includes a main “search and analysis tool”, a tool for sharing “recommendations and lead results” with HSI field offices, and a mobile application.