ICE brought War on Terror detention and war tech home, new report finds
Without the War on Terror there would be no ICE: CAGE report traces Trump’s deportation machine back to 9/11, as migrants are once again held at Guantánamo Bay
London — Today the 26th of October 2026, CAGE International publishes The Spiralling War of Terror: How Trump Inherited the National Security Machine He Now Wields. The report shows that the immigration crackdown dominating the US midterm elections was not invented by the current administration. It was built over two decades of the War on Terror, by both parties, and handed over ready to use.
ICE was created by the post-9/11 Homeland Security Act. Its first head, Michael J. Garcia, was a career terrorism prosecutor appointed to break up the old immigration service and fold its enforcement arm into the new Department of Homeland Security [1]. The methods ICE relies on today were first used against Muslims after 9/11. More than 1,000 Arab and South Asian Muslim men were rounded up in the weeks after the attacks, many of them cut off from their families and lawyers. Today migrants are moved between detention sites with no record, and their relatives cannot find them [2]. Weeks after 9/11, the Justice Department also expanded the “automatic stay”, a rule that lets the government override a judge’s order to release someone from detention. It was used to keep Muslim men in custody who had no connection to the attacks [3]. ICE now uses the same rule to keep migrants locked up after judges order them freed.
ICE was created under President Bush and expanded under President Obama, whose nationwide rollout of the Secure Communities programme earned him the name “deporter-in-chief”. By 2019, daily immigration detention had risen from 19,000 before 9/11 to 50,000. Under the current administration, ICE has become the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the United States.
The surveillance follows the same pattern. For eleven years, the New York Police Department spied on Muslim communities across the city and beyond, sending informants into mosques and mapping where Muslims ate, shopped and prayed, without producing a single lead [4]. That approach treated whole communities as suspects rather than individuals, and it is now ICE’s model. ICE draws on fusion centres, the state and regional intelligence hubs created after 9/11 so that local police and federal agencies could pool information, which were long used to monitor Muslim communities. It uses battlefield surveillance tools from Iraq and Afghanistan on American streets. And at the US-Mexico border it deploys surveillance towers from the Israeli arms company Elbit Systems, whose sensors line the border of Gaza and whose smart fences cut through the occupied West Bank, technology built to keep Palestinians in an open air prison [5].
No company embodies this better than Palantir. Seeded by the CIA’s venture capital arm and built to hunt targets in Iraq and Afghanistan, Palantir has turned the War on Terror into a business model and brought it home. In April 2025, ICE handed it a $30 million no-bid contract to build “ImmigrationOS”, a system to track and target immigrants for deportation. Palantir also built ELITE, an app ICE uses to choose which neighbourhoods to raid. ELITE draws on Medicaid data to build dossiers on people, and gives each target a “confidence score” for their home address. Palantir’s software was behind some of the most brutal workplace raids of Trump’s first term, and its staff were on site for a mass raid in the Bronx where most of those detained were not even non-citizens. Its sole-source contract to run ICE’s case management system has grown to more than $145 million. Palantir is not a neutral supplier. It is the War on Terror’s targeting machine, now pointed at migrants, and it profits from every raid [6].
The same national security logic has been turned on Palestinian voices for decades. Professor Sami Al-Arian, a Palestinian academic, was arrested in February 2003 and prosecuted on terrorism charges. More than twenty years later, in March 2025, ICE arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate of Columbia University, and sought to deport him for his advocacy on Gaza. The report traces a direct line between the two.
Nowhere is the connection clearer than at Guantánamo Bay, where migrants are once again being detained. A Senate oversight report released on 9 October found that around 850 men had passed through the immigration operation there. Staff could not say whose detention rules applied, and the facilities fell short of federal standards. Last month, eight Somali men were deported after being held in Camp 6, a block built to hold the Muslim men detained without charge in the War on Terror. Among them was Adam Abdullah, a St Paul mechanic with a work permit and no criminal record, who had been told the flight to Cuba was only a refuelling stop.
The report also documents how the same laws are now turned on dissent. In the Prairieland case in Texas, protesters outside an ICE facility received multi-decade sentences after prosecutors presented their use of Signal, their black clothing and their reading material as evidence of a conspiracy. These tactics were honed over twenty years of prosecutions against Muslim defendants.
Asim Qureshi, Research Director at CAGE International, said:
“Whoever wins on 3 November will inherit this machine. These powers cannot be reformed, only abolished. The movement against ICE and the movement against Guantánamo are fighting the same system, and this report is an invitation for them to stand together.”
The report calls for an end to treating “national security” as grounds for suspending fundamental rights. It urges communities and campaigners to reject the divide between “good” and “bad” Muslims and immigrants that the security state depends on.
[ENDS]
NOTES TO EDITORS
- The full report is available here.
- Moazzam Begg, Asim Qureshi our Research Director, David Chmielewski a researcher at CAGE and author of the report, are available for interview.
- CAGE International is an independent advocacy organisation that has documented the War on Terror since 2003, when it began campaigning for the men held at Guantánamo Bay. Its staff include former Guantánamo prisoners, and it works to challenge state policies developed under the War on Terror and to empower communities affected by them.
- Media enquiries: karsen@cage.ngo | +44 (0)7546 145930
REFERENCES
[1] The White House, Michael J. Garcia: Former Assistant Secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 2003–2005, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/government/garciam-bio.html
[2] Amnesty International (2025), Torture and Enforced Disappearances in the Sunshine State, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/amr51/0511/2025/en/; Tumlin K (2004), Suspect First: How Terrorism Policy Is Reshaping Immigration Policy, California Law Review, Vol 92
[3] Department of Justice, Interim Rule on Review of Custody Determinations, 66 Fed. Reg. 54909 (31 October 2001), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2001-10-31/html/01-27447.htm; Jorjani R (2010), Ignoring the Court’s Order: The Automatic Stay in Immigration Detention Cases, Intercultural Human Rights Law Review, Vol 5
[4] Bates A (2016), NYPD Spied on Muslim Communities for 11 Years, Never Found a Single Lead, Cato Institute, https://www.cato.org/commentary/nypd-spied-muslim-communities-11-years-neverfound-single-lead
[5] Miller T (2015), Gaza in Arizona: How Israeli High-Tech Firms Will Up-Armor the US-Mexican Border, TomDispatch, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/01/26/gaza-arizona-how-israeli-high-tech-firms-will-armor-us-mexican-border; Ynet News, New tunnel detection system to operate on Gaza border, https://www.ynetnews.com/article/4647664
[6] American Civil Liberties Union (2026), All the Ways Palantir is Assisting Trump’s Abusive Removal Campaign, https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/palantir-deportation-roundup; Wired (2025), ICE Is Paying Palantir $30 Million to Build ‘ImmigrationOS’ Surveillance Platform; 404 Media (2026), ‘ELITE’: The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid; Davis-Cohen S (2020), New Documentary Reveals Silicon Valley’s Role in Notorious Bronx Gang Raid, The Appeal
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