Fifteen minutes east of Senator Bernie Sanders’s headquarters in Burlington, Vermont, sit the nerve centers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s national efforts to target immigrants for deportation. Two of ICE’s three main targeting facilities, in addition to its tip line, are located in the hamlet of Williston, which has seen mounting protests in recent weeks over plans to hire round-the-clock analysts to aid the Trump administration’s deportation goals.
The targeting centers are fueling an unprecedented immigration crackdown across the country, one that has drawn widespread condemnation from politicians and citizens alike. Harrowing videos have captured masked ICE officers arresting U.S. citizens, shooting at clergy, and threatening first responders with lethal force. And while ICE has abandoned some of its focused targeting practices in favor of broad sweeps, the targeting that remains is driven by two offices in Williston.
One of these facilities is the National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center, or NCATC, which serves as the nexus for intelligence that is sent to ICE’s 25 enforcement and removal operations, or ERO, field offices across the country. The intelligence packaged by the NCATC for ERO “door kickers” includes biographical information, criminal history, immigration history, custody data, immigration benefit information, naturalization information, and vehicle and insurance data. Thanks to a memorandum of understanding signed in April by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, it now also includes IRS data, the legality of which is being contested in court.
Per ICE’s own documentation, the NCATC routinely queries data sets containing vast numbers of U.S. citizens. In addition to data owned and maintained by the government, the NCATC also sends queries, “on a weekly basis,” to commercial data brokers hunting for information on targets the government can’t collect itself. This month, dozens of protesters gathered outside the NCATC to protest the center’s plan to hire some dozen open-source intelligence analysts to work round the clock scouring social media for information to use further targeting immigrants for deportation.
But these hires pale in comparison to the 100 new employees that the Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, Williston tip line plans to hire, according to a federal solicitation posted at the beginning of the month. While HSI special agents previously worked high-profile drug and human smuggling cases, the Trump administration has increasingly pulled HSI special agents into the dragnet of mass immigration enforcement on targets who have not been accused of major crimes. With 100 new staffers, the HSI tip line is ramping up to take any and all tips, no matter how small.
According to the October 1 HSI solicitation, the 90 call center analysts and 10 supervisors will not only take calls reporting alleged immigration violations but also report other alleged criminal or civil infractions to other agencies. Call center employees are also charged with investigating the allegations that come in through the tip line, will conduct research in Department of Homeland Security and commercial or open-source databases, and “if possible, corroborate their potential involvement in alleged criminal activity.”
Of particular note to Vermonters is the fact that there is no requirement for these new hires to actually live in Vermont: “The place of performance for this task order is Remote. Remote work is authorized and can be performed using Government Furnished Equipment (GFE). Contractor personnel shall be responsible for retrieving GFE from ICE,” the solicitation reads.
A second leg of DHS’s targeting triad, ICE’s Law Enforcement Support Center, or LESC, is co-located in Williston, serving as ICE’s national point of contact for federal, state, and local law enforcement. A local police interaction in any state can trigger a query to the LESC, where information is identified and packaged as a lead that is then forwarded to the NCATC for further investigation.
At a September speech in McAllen, Texas, on his Fight the Oligarchy tour, Senator Bernie Sanders told the assembled crowd that “we got to figure out a way to stop ICE from what they are doing as soon as possible.” But when pressed for information about what, if anything, Vermont’s elected leaders are doing to stop ICE’s nerve center outside of Burlington, Sanders did not respond to The New Republic’s request for comment.
Other members of Vermont’s congressional delegation did.
“DHS’s reported plans to expand intelligence gathering operations at the National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center in Williston cannot become a backdoor for mass surveillance of Vermonters or U.S. residents,” a spokesperson for Senator Peter Welch wrote in a statement.
“Senator Welch has been and will continue to work to hold the Trump Administration accountable when its mass deportation agenda violates federal law or hurts Vermonters. These plans appear to be in an initial phase and our office is actively working to gather more information.”
Rebecaa Balint, Vermont’s sole U.S. representative, told TNR, “The idea of expanding NCATC to blindly comb social media brings up serious constitutional and privacy concerns. We cannot let the Trump administration use immigration to veil their creation of a surveillance state. My office is working to investigate as this develops.”
Despite Vermont electeds’ concerns about the increase in NCATC staffing, they have failed to take concrete action to limit ICE’s ability to conduct national targeting operations from one of the most liberal states in the country. So far, no one has called for the elimination of state and local law enforcement collaboration with joint task forces involving DHS, worked to evict ICE’s targeting operations from Vermont, or obtained and released information on ICE’s internal targeting protocols.
Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security continues to consolidate control of federal law enforcement beyond immigration through Homeland Security Task Forces authorized by Executive Order 14159, signed by President Trump in January. Part of the order creates an archipelago of task forces across the country to envelop state and local agencies, in addition to the FBI and DEA under the control of DHS, the most subservient and reckless of the federal agencies.
National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, signed by Trump at the end of last month, further emboldens these task forces to pursue anyone opposing his administration’s migration policy, in addition to anyone holding so-called “anti-American” sentiments. The order will likely double the federal terrorism watchlist, and states explicitly that opposition to ICE agents is part of the directive’s impetus for cracking down on dissent.
As Democrats continue to “sound the alarm” about the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, vanishingly little is being done in the People’s Republic of Vermont to halt the flow of targeting intelligence to masked agents trampling on civil rights and chilling free speech across the country. For now, the most liberal state in the union will remain ground zero for an incredibly illiberal intelligence operation.
