ICE bought vehicles equipped with fake cell towers to spy on phones

Summary

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) paid $825,000 earlier this year to a company that manufactures vehicles equipped with various technologies for law enforcement, including fake cellphone towers known as “cell-site simulators,” which can be used to spy on nearby phones. According to public records, the award dated May 8 “provides Cell Site Simulator (CSS) Vehicles to support the Homeland Security Technical Operations program” and is a modification for “additional CSS Vehicles.” The contract was signed with TechOps Specialty Vehicles (TOSV), a Maryland-based company. TOSV also signed a similar contract with ICE in September 2024 for $818,000, showing that the relationship between the agency and the company predates the Trump administration. TOSV president Jon Brianas told TechCrunch in an email that he could not provide details about the ICE contracts and the vehicles, citing “trade secrets.” But Brianas did confirm that the company does provide cell-site simulators, although it does not make them. “We don’t manufacture electrical, comms, and technology components, we integrate that product into our overall design of the vehicle,” said Brianas, who declined to say from where TOSV sources its cell-site simulators. This is the latest federal contract that reveals some of the technologies powering the Trump administration’s deportation crackdown. In early September, Forbes found a recently unsealed search warrant that showed that ICE used a cell-site simulator to track down a person who allegedly was part of a criminal gang in the United States, and who had been ordered to leave the country in 2023. In the article, Forbes reported that it also found a contract for “cell site simulator vehicles,” but the article did not name the company that provides the vans to the agency. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 Cell-site simulators also go by the name “stingrays” because some of the earlier types of these devices, made by defense contractor Har...