I have the data, and I must scream

Three weeks tracing DHS contracts through Baltimore, the Mid-Atlantic, and beyond

DEAR EXPOSEUR—You might be wondering where I’ve been these past few weeks. I wish I could say I was back after some misadventure, or a post-Halloween sugar coma. The truth is I’ve spent the last three weeks in a frenzy of government contracts, meetings with journalists, community leaders, elected city officials, and even congressional staff members. Photography has been the furthest thing from my mind. I find myself now at a crossroads and feel I owe you at least some explanation.

What happened was this: I was scrolling the Baltimore subreddit one night and saw a post about a potential uptick in ICE activity. The person who posted had noticed contract notices on SAM.gov, where the federal government advertises upcoming solicitations. Having spent twenty years in the military, I have an embarrassing affection for procurement documents, so I offered to take a look and see if their concerns held water.

Down the rabbit hole I fell.

Within days, a small group of us (former military, law students, community organizers, government contract specialists) were parsing a rapid, horrifying wave of new Homeland Security procurements tied to the passage of H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

For example: Price Modern, LLC, based here in Charm City, received $14 million to furnish new ICE offices in Baltimore, with an additional $68 million awarded to outfit expanded ICE facilities in cities across the country.

Or consider the $1.6 million to Techops Specialty Vehicles, LLC in Stevensville, Maryland for mobile cell-site simulator vans. Most people know these as Stingrays. They mimic cell towers, capture signals, and allow agents to locate devices and the people carrying them.

That pales compared to Border Patrol’s requests for Cellebrite technology that extracts data from locked Android and iOS devices, accessing encrypted files users believed were private. Or ICE’s $11 million expansion of these same forensic capabilities across Mid-Atlantic offices.

More troubling still: a solicitation for armed detainee transportation services connecting Baltimore’s ICE field office to airports and detention facilities up to 900 miles away, from North Carolina to Massachusetts. Combined with a $292 million expansion of ICE’s chartered deportation flights. Coinciding with the transfer of Camp East Montana on Fort Bliss in El Paso, TX to DHS for expanded detention capacity.

I could continue down the list of the nearly one hundred procurements we documented, but I lack the fortitude.

Right there on paper was a roadmap for mass dragnet surveillance, detention, and rapid removal operations. Cell-site simulators tracking phones in neighborhoods. AI platforms (Palantir’s ICM system, to be specific) aggregating data from social media scraping, facial recognition (Clearview AI), device forensics, and commercial data brokers to identify targets. Transportation networks designed to move people hundreds of miles from their attorneys and families within days. A $20-50 million tip line expansion encouraging neighbor-against-neighbor reporting. Zero-click spyware (the Graphite platform) that can compromise smartphones without the user clicking anything, recently reactivated despite previous controversy.

We compiled everything into a comprehensive report. We reached out to local press, thinking surely this warranted investigation. WYPR thankfully ran a story. The others seemed more interested in human interest pieces about the Paul Revere of Patterson Park than investigating the unprecedented expansion of surveillance and enforcement infrastructure being built in their city. And we met with national journalists who struggled to cover the data for fear of lawsuits from the current administration.

We met with city officials, who expressed concern but admitted limited jurisdiction over federal operations. Fair play.

We briefed congressional staff, who took notes and thanked us for their time, but are overwhelmed with all the other things happening in our government presently.

We connected with community organizations who, thankfully, used this information to beef up their “know your rights” resources and community safety plans.

The frustration I feel is difficult to articulate. The procurement record is public and the implications are clear. The capabilities being bought and deployed in Baltimore and beyond raise fundamental questions about everyone’s privacy, due process, and the relationship between federal agencies and the communities they monitor.

These concerns grow more acute when considered alongside National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which directs Joint Terrorism Task Forces to investigate “entities and individuals engaged in acts of political violence and intimidation designed to suppress lawful political activity.” The memorandum identifies “common threads” of domestic terrorism including “extremism on migration, race, and gender” and “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views,” while listing activities like “organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder” as domestic terrorism priorities. When surveillance infrastructure built ostensibly for immigration enforcement can be redirected toward anyone deemed to hold “extremist” views on migration, the line between national security and political suppression becomes dangerously thin. Yet the response has been muted at best.

Perhaps I expected too much. Or the story is too complex, too technical, too cerebral for the upcoming midterm campaign season or a holiday news cycle. Perhaps people are simply exhausted by crisis after crisis and cannot absorb one more.

But I cannot pretend that these systems, once built, will simply go away. Infrastructure outlasts intentions. Capabilities deployed under one administration become available to the next. Surveillance tools justified for one purpose inevitably expand to others. Immigrant or not, this expansion should horrify everyone as ICE and CBP continue their campaign of indiscriminate violence in yet more American cities.

So I find myself asking: what do you do when you’ve documented something that matters, compiled the evidence, presented it to people whose job is to inform the public or represent constituents, and gotten mostly silence in return?

I don’t have a good answer yet. For now, I’m continuing to work with community organizations preparing rapid response networks and know-your-rights resources. I’m trying to figure out what comes next.

The week of November 17th, ICE ramped up enforcement operations in East Baltimore. Given everything we’d documented in the procurement record, this came as a surprise to no one who’d been paying attention. The infrastructure we found on paper is now active on the streets.

I’ll be back to photography soon. But I thought you deserved to know where I’ve been, and why.