1. United States
2. Texas
3. Letter

I’m asking you to demand a full accounting of ICE’s cell-site simulator program. Order a GAO audit of what the agency has spent on this technology, and require ICE to disclose how many times it has deployed these devices, whether it obtained a warrant each time, how many bystanders’ phones were swept up, and how long that data is kept. ICE has already spent more than $1.6 million on vans built to carry these devices, including an $825,000 contract in May 2025. Asked whether it gets a warrant before switching them on, the agency didn’t answer. A cell-site simulator impersonates a cell tower. Phones nearby connect to it automatically, and the device pulls their identifiers. It cannot tell the difference between a target and the people around him. A neighbor on her porch, a reporter covering a raid, a kid walking to school, all of them get swept into the net. Documents obtained by the ACLU show ICE deployed these devices at least 466 times between 2017 and 2019. Nobody outside the agency knows how many innocent Americans that touched. This should bother every member of Congress regardless of party. In 2016, a bipartisan House Oversight Committee report recommended that Congress require a probable-cause warrant before any agency uses one of these devices. DHS has an internal policy saying the same. Congress never wrote it into law, and a policy is not a law. An agency can revise it on a Tuesday afternoon and tell no one. That’s the gap ICE operates in right now. Then there’s the money. Congress handed ICE $75 billion in 2025 and roughly $70 billion more this June, against an agency that historically ran on about $10 billion a year, with almost no reporting requirements attached. Meanwhile the enhanced ACA premium tax credits expired December 31. Subsidized enrollees now pay an average of 114% more, up from $888 a year to $1,904, and CBO projects 2.2 million more Americans uninsured in 2026. We were told there wasn’t money for that. There was money for surveillance vans. Three asks. Open a GAO audit into the cost and legal authority of this program. Compel ICE to report every deployment, every warrant, and every retention policy to Congress. And pass the warrant requirement your own committee recommended a decade ago. If ICE is following the rules, none of this costs the agency a thing. If it isn’t, we need to know before another dollar goes out the door.