ICE and its Connections to Israeli Intelligence.

This week on State of Play, host Greg Stoker is joined by Jalyssa Dugrot, an independent journalist recently arrested while covering anti-ICE protests for MintPress News in Los Angeles, and Robert Inlakesh, a Middle East analyst and MintPress contributor known for his reporting on politics, repression, and empire, to examine a rapidly expanding surveillance regime that connects U.S. immigration enforcement to Israeli military intelligence and private tech firms.

In early 2025, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) assembled a covert unit called the “Tiger Team,” a task force supposedly created to address “critical threats.” But leaked testimony obtained by the Knight First Amendment Institute revealed that this unit compiled over 100 surveillance reports targeting student activists based on a list of roughly 5,000 student names.

The source of that list? Canary Mission, a secretive website known for publishing dossiers on pro‑Palestinian students, professors, and organizers, often without credible evidence. The site has been widely condemned for stoking harassment and professional retaliation against activists.

This isn’t the first time ICE has worked with pro‑Israel advocacy networks. According to a 2018 report by Deadly Exchange, Peter Edge, then ICE’s acting deputy director, attended an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) training seminar in Israel.

Marketed as counterterrorism training, these seminars have been criticized for promoting “worst practices,” such as mass surveillance, militarized policing, deportation raids, and policies that blur the line between security and political repression.

However, the ICE-Israeli connection extends even deeper into the digital realm. In October 2024, Wired reported that ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division had signed a $2 million contract with Paragon Solutions, an Israeli spyware firm with ties to several veterans of Unit 8200. Unit 8200 is Israel’s elite cyber-intelligence agency, akin to the NSA, and known for its work in hacking and digital surveillance.

Paragon’s tools reportedly can breach encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp, Signal, and Gmail. While the company denies abuse, the mere licensing of this technology to ICE raises grave concerns about domestic spying and civil liberties, especially when those technologies are potentially accessible to foreign intelligence entities via backdoors.

Paragon’s founders include former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and several former Unit 8200 officers, part of the same revolving door between Israeli military intelligence and private tech ventures that now service U.S. law enforcement.

Another example is Zencity, an Israeli analytics firm marketed as a less invasive tool for public sentiment analysis. It works with U.S. cities like Phoenix and Pittsburgh, claiming to avoid protest-specific surveillance. Yet its co-founder, Eyal Feder-Levy, was trained in Israeli military intelligence.

These developments illustrate a chilling trend: The same tools and tactics developed to suppress Palestinians under occupation are being imported and applied to immigrant communities and protest movements in the U.S.