App Lets ICE Track Vehicles and Owners Across the Country (www.404media.co)

Internal ICE materials reviewed by 404 Media show the agency demoed a mobile app called Mobile Companion that lets officers instantly scan license plates and add them to a nationwide database of “billions” of detections. The capability is powered by Motorola Solutions (via Vigilant Solutions and Digital Recognition Network) and marketed to integrate with Thomson Reuters’ CLEAR analysis platform. Motorola’s network combines fixed and patrol-mounted LPR cameras plus crowd‑sourced feeds from repossession vehicles; its tools provide historical sightings, “convoy analysis” (vehicles traveling together) and predictive location estimates. Mobile Companion also ties into a Vehicle Manager desktop, sends push alerts for hot-listed plates, and can capture face images for upload to Vigilant’s FaceSearch facial-recognition gallery. Thomson Reuters’ CLEAR aggregates public and proprietary records—driver license data, credit headers, vehicle registrations, voter rolls, addresses and associates—enabling rapid linkage of plates to identities and broader personal data, despite a Thomson Reuters spokesperson stating Mobile Companion is unrelated to CLEAR. For AI/ML and privacy communities this matters because it operationalizes large-scale sensor fusion and identity linkage in real time: multimodal LPR outputs, facial matches, and record linkage across massive third-party datasets. The system amplifies predictive and surveillance capabilities with minimal transparency or apparent warrant requirements, raising civil‑liberties, bias and due‑process risks—especially given ICE’s role in deportation and continued multimillion‑dollar contracts with data brokers. The deployment illustrates how commercial data, ML-enabled matching, and camera networks converge to create powerful, opaque tools for enforcement.