ICE spent two million dollars of your money on a surveillance tool that can covertly seize control of a phone, vacuum up your messages, photos, and location data, and do it all without you knowing a thing. A senator is demanding to know what the hell is going on. ICE's response, so far, has been to stare at the wall and say nothing.
The Software That Can Own Your Phone
The tool in question is called Graphite. It was developed by Israeli firm Paragon Solutions, is now owned by a company called REDLattice, and according to CBS News, ICE purchased it through a sole-source contract worth $2 million. Sole-source means they didn't competitively bid it out. They just decided they wanted it, decided who they wanted to buy it from, and bought it.
Graphite is not a traffic camera. It is not a license plate reader. According to CBS News, this software is capable of covertly taking control of phones and collecting messages, photographs, location information and other personal data. That's the full package. That's the kind of thing you'd expect to find in a spy novel, except it's real, it was purchased by a domestic immigration enforcement agency, and nobody in charge has explained why.
The Senator Who Is Extremely Not Happy About This
Democratic Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, the ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on July 23 calling this purchase "one of the most significant expansions of DHS and ICE's surveillance ambitions to date." CBS News obtained the letter exclusively.
Peters isn't just rattled by the purchase itself. He's rattled by the context. Public reporting has already documented that Graphite was used to target more than 90 journalists and civil society members across multiple countries. That's not speculation. That's documented. And now the agency that has been caught tracking protesters, scraping social media posts, and building surveillance databases on people exercising their First Amendment rights has this tool in its kit.
Peters wants to know if Graphite has been deployed domestically, who has been targeted, and what legal authority ICE is leaning on to justify using it. Straightforward questions. The kind of thing you'd expect a federal agency operating in a democracy to be able to answer without breaking a sweat.
ICE Has Been Ghosting Congress for Seven Months
Here's where it gets worse. According to CBS News, Peters' committee staff requested briefings from the Department of Homeland Security back in December 2025 and from ICE in January 2026. It is now late July 2026. They never heard back substantively. Seven months of silence.
This is not a clerical oversight. This is an agency that purchased covert phone-hacking software, got asked about it by the congressional committee responsible for oversight, and decided the correct move was to say absolutely nothing and wait for everyone to get bored and go away.
Peters has now given ICE a hard deadline of August 7 to provide documents and answer questions. The problem, as CBS News notes, is that because Democrats don't control Congress, Peters can't actually compel ICE to comply. He can request. He can write letters. He can hold press calls. But he cannot force them to show up. Whether the Republican majority on that committee does anything with this information remains, let's say, an open question.
A Timeline That Raises Its Own Questions
The CBS News report flags a detail worth sitting with. The original contract for Graphite was signed in September 2024. Then, in October 2024, someone issued a stop-work order. Then, in August 2025, the contract was reactivated. Peters is asking for records and explanations covering all three of those moments.
What happened between October 2024 and August 2025 that caused someone to pump the brakes and then un-pump them? What changed? Who made those calls? These are not trick questions. They are the basic accountability questions that oversight exists to answer. Peters also wants to know whether any data collected by Graphite has been shared with other government agencies, private companies, or nonprofits, which is a question that should make anyone paying attention sit up a little straighter.
CBS News reached out to ICE, DHS, Graphite, and REDLattice for comment. At time of publication, the silence appears to be collective.
The Dingo Take
Let's be clear about what we're looking at. ICE is an agency that has been credibly documented collecting information on protest activity and social media posts. It is an agency that, under the current administration, has been operating with an appetite for surveillance that keeps expanding. And now it has spent two million dollars on a piece of software that can silently take over your phone and send everything on it somewhere else. That's not a slippery slope argument. That's the current situation.
The spyware-for-journalists angle is not a side detail. Graphite has already been used, in other contexts, to go after reporters and civil society workers. The fact that Peters explicitly does not allege ICE has done this yet is actually cold comfort, because the question is whether the infrastructure is now in place to do it, and the answer to that question appears to be yes. Buying the gun and saying you haven't shot anyone yet is not the reassurance officials seem to think it is.
Congress invented oversight for exactly this kind of moment. An agency buying covert phone-hacking software through a no-bid contract, stonewalling briefing requests for the better part of a year, and refusing to disclose who it has targeted is precisely the scenario where a functioning oversight apparatus is supposed to kick in and demand answers. Peters is trying. But when the majority party has no interest in pulling on this thread, a letter with a deadline is just a letter with a deadline. August 7 will come. Don't hold your breath.
