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Part of ICE\u2019s power \u2014 and there is no use acting like it doesn\u2019t have power \u2014 comes from the veil of secrecy the agency attempts to hide behind, even as it also seeks to make itself ever-present in American life. In a place like New York City, it is hard to anticipate when and where ICE will appear: Anonymous vans and SUVs roll through a neighborhood, someone catches a glimpse of the armed and armored men inside, and reports begin to circulate through formal and informal rapid-response networks<\/a> as well as neighborhood parenting and soccer-pickup chats. People take action, and reporters and news crews try to catch up. Mild-mannered ex-comptroller Brad Lander is going to court<\/a> to try to shed some light on what actually goes on at 26 Federal Plaza (which his presence allegedly obstructed<\/a>). And yet for all the masks and the mystery, we already know quite a bit about how and where ICE operates in New York \u2014\u00a0and about the company the agency keeps.<\/p>\n ICE is currently on a bit of a real-estate tear as it expands its physical footprint<\/a>: The agency recently announced a plan to spend more than $38 billion picking up warehouses and other \u201cnontraditional facilities\u201d as part of its sprawling detention operation. In and around New York, Wired reports<\/a>, there are plans to open detention facilities and offices from northern New Jersey to the Hudson Valley<\/a> and Long Island. In the city proper, the agency\u2019s Enforcement and Removal Operations division maintains a field office at 26 Federal Plaza \u2014 the scene of brutal separations<\/a>, mass protests, and secret detention cells<\/a>. The federal building at 201 Varick Street hosts another immigration court<\/a>, where ICE agents have reportedly<\/a> detained<\/a> immigrants appearing for routine check-ins. Last summer, ICE began holding immigrants in the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal jail in Sunset Park, taking over two full cell blocks. (\u201cIt\u2019s suffering. That\u2019s what I went through there,\u201d one man, who spent seven months at MDC after he was arrested following a court appearance, told the City<\/a>. \u201cPeople are suffering there.\u201d)<\/p>\n ICE\u2019s vehicle of choice is an unmarked van, and it parks at least part of its fleet at Pier 40 on the Hudson River, just steps from some of the busiest recreational fields in Manhattan. Following reporting from Hell Gate<\/a> and the City<\/a>, the Hudson River Park Trust announced that it would allow the contract to expire in June, though some elected officials<\/a> are demanding that it be cancelled immediately. In a statement provided by a spokesperson, the Trust said it was reviewing the electeds\u2019 request with counsel and would \u201ccontinue striving to keep the park welcoming, safe and accessible for all.\u201d ICE also paid ABM Industries, headquartered on the seventh floor of One Liberty Plaza, for \u200b\u200bparking spaces\u00a0\u2014<\/a> not in New York but at the Honolulu airport. ICE arrests in Hawaii more than quadrupled<\/a> last year. ABM did not respond to my request for comment. (ICE similarly did not respond to any questions for this piece.)<\/p>\n The agency also needs somewhere to store its own people, at least on occasion, and trying to track that can feel like a game of hide-and-seek. Protests erupted at a Hilton location in Tribeca in late January after rumors spread that ICE agents were being housed there. (Whether any were actually there is difficult to say; for what it\u2019s worth, anonymous sources \u201cconfirmed<\/a>\u201d to the New York Post that there were not.) Three agents, meanwhile, were lodged at a Marriott in New York \u201cin support\u201d of the U.N. General Assembly last year. The payment<\/a> was to the address of the Marriott Marquis in Time Square, but it\u2019s not clear if that\u2019s where the agents actually stayed. The company, which pledged<\/a> in 2019 not to cooperate with the agency, did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n But ICE\u2019s presence in the city extends beyond ICE \u2014\u00a0the agency can\u2019t do its work alone. After the muckrakers at Sludge compiled the agency\u2019s 2025 contracts<\/a> into a national map, I took a closer look at where ICE is spending its money in the five boroughs. Of the 13 New York City firms that did business with ICE last year, 12 are located in Manhattan. Many are high tech; others are quite mundane. All work toward the same end.<\/p>\n Perhaps the most well known \u2014 certainly the most well remunerated \u2014 of ICE\u2019s business partners in the city last year was Clearview AI, which received $3.75 million<\/a> to license its facial-recognition software to the agency. Though the firm closed its New York office late last year (per a Clearview spokesperson), it was previously located in the (now former) WeWork location at 214 West 29th Street, surrounded by Prets a Manger and office-supply stores, south of Madison Square Garden. The Department of Homeland Security has long used Clearview\u2019s technology, primarily to investigate child exploitation; now, ICE is also using it to investigate attacks on law-enforcement officers \u2014 which is to say, to surveil protestors<\/a>. Agents in Minnesota were reportedly using Clearview and other facial-recognition tools in conjunction with a Palantir database to identify demonstrators and track people targeted for deportation. While technically not a New York company \u2014 it recently announced it was moving its headquarters<\/a> from Denver to Miami \u2014 Palantir has offices in the city and is looking to expand its square footage<\/a> in Manhattan. \u201cThe conglomeration of all these technologies together is giving the government unprecedented abilities,\u201d an ACLU lawyer told the New York Times<\/a>.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, another Chelsea co-working space, Jay Suites<\/a>, at 159 West 25th Street, hosts the Language Bank, which provided ICE with translation and interpretation services<\/a> during immigration hearings last year. The Language Bank did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n Up in Midtown, we find two open-source intelligence firms contracted to work with ICE: Skopenow<\/a>, at 12 East 49th Street, in a glass tower across the street from Saks, and Cobwebs America<\/a>, at 1441 Broadway, fifth floor, on a block of souvenir shops across from a Paris Baguette. Skopenow was awarded $19,500 for \u201cbuilding intelligence reports,\u201d while Cobwebs was cumulatively awarded $551,313 \u201cto gather open-source intelligence from different platforms\u201d for HSI\u2019s Office of Intelligence. (This was just part of a $3.4 million contract that began in 2023.) Pitched as social-media surveillance, tools like Skopenow and Cobwebs have expanded ICE and other agencies\u2019 capacities significantly. Combined with facial-recognition technology like Clearview\u2019s, ICE could theoretically create dossiers tying any given person it interacts with to everything they\u2019ve ever posted, shared, liked, or written on the internet. \u201cThis is a mass effort to look for disfavored speech that would not be possible with just a couple agents in an office,\u201d Lisa Femia, a civil-liberties attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me.<\/p>\n Anthony Winslow, vice-president of marketing for Skopenow, told me in an email that the company\u2019s contract with ICE \u201csupports the financial fraud team\u201d of the Homeland Security Investigations division. HSI agents, ostensibly investigating fraud, were going door-to-door<\/a> in Minneapolis earlier this year. Winslow declined to answer other questions. Pen-Link, the parent company<\/a> of Cobwebs America \u2014 an Israeli firm<\/a> that was contracted<\/a> to monitor protestors in Portland in 2020 and was acquired<\/a> by Americans in 2023 \u2014 did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n ICE-HSI\u00a0also has contracts with several New York firms specializing in blockchain analysis. Two blocks north of Skopenow, at 45 Rockefeller Plaza \u2014 just around the corner from the LEGO Store \u2014 is Naxo Labs, which received $1.6 million last year to aid ICE in \u201ccomplex darknet cybercrime investigations<\/a>.\u201d The firm was co-founded<\/a> by the FBI agents who took down the Silk Road; one of them now hosts a podcast<\/a> with a former blackhat hacker turned federal informant. Just around the corner from Gracie Mansion, at 1632 First Avenue, is Elliptic, which was paid $650,000 for assisting<\/a> ICE with investigations of cyber crime \u2014 which, according to the agency<\/a>, consists of \u201cany illegal activity carried out using computers or the internet.\u201d Neither firm responded to my questions.<\/p>\n Industry rival Chainalysis has an office in Chelsea, on the 18th floor of 114 Fifth Avenue, above a Lululemon. (I used to work in the same building, when GMG, formerly known as Gizmodo Media, formerly known as Gawker Media, kept offices there.) Purchase orders listed on usaspending.gov indicate that Chainalysis licenses its software to HSI to assist with cyber investigations<\/a> into \u201cillicit cryptocurrency transactions<\/a>\u201d \u2014 but actually, company spokesperson Maddie Kennedy explained to me, \u201cChainalysis, Inc., based in NYC, does not work with any U.S. government customers.\u201d The company\u2019s website<\/a> would seem to indicate otherwise. Not so, per Kennedy: \u201cAll U.S. government contracts are managed by a separate subsidiary, Chainalysis Government Solutions (CGS), based in Virginia. Chainalysis, Inc., does not know who CGS\u2019s U.S. government customers are.\u201d Got it? Sure.\u00a0Anyway: A Virginia-based subsidiary of New York City\u2013based Chainalysis \u2014\u00a0which would like to emphasize that it does not know anything about the work its subsidiary does for its government clients \u2014 holds contracts with ICE.<\/p>\n Elsewhere, on the East Side of Manhattan, at 633 Third Avenue, in \u201ca classic Grand Central skyscraper that embodies the optimism of the post-war era<\/a>,\u201d we find Fedcap, which provides ICE with courier services, including the transportation of files to immigration court<\/a>. (Fedcap did not respond to a request for comment.) On the West Side, meanwhile, the accounting and professional services giant Ernst & Young, at 1 Manhattan West, a megadevelopment neighboring Hudson Yards, received close to $1.5 million<\/a> from ICE last year. Most of that went to Dignari LLC<\/a>, a Virginia-based firm that EY acquired in October 2024<\/a> to shore up its public-sector services, specifically with DHS. So what does it do? The contract is with Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) for \u201cnational docket support services\u201d: seemingly helping to manage all of the different deportation cases the agency is pursuing. ERO just re-upped its contract at the end of January to the tune of $2 million. EY did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n The only Brooklyn business on the list is Caprice Electronics, an electronics retailer right across the street from Mermaid Spa, at 2902 West 37th Street on Coney Island. It was paid $44,940 for a number of heavy-duty suitcases<\/a>. Caprice did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n Not every business doing business with ICE in New York City is a New York City business, however. For example, somebody in the local ICE office must have gotten themselves a new desk or chair or something, paying $3,174 to the Baltimore-based Price Modern for \u201cfurniture design services<\/a>.\u201d More insidiously, Paragon Professional Services was paid $3.6 million last year for transporting and guarding detainees<\/a> in the \u201cNYC area of responsibility\u201d (and $1.7 million for the same<\/a> in Newark). It was paid another $2 million<\/a> early this January \u201cto safely transport detained aliens.\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s likely more to know. According to Wired<\/a>, ICE and DHS have asked the General Services Administration, which manages federal agencies\u2019 offices, to obscure their moves in the real-estate market owing to \u201cnational security concerns.\u201d Already, ICE is expanding so quickly that it can hardly keep track of what it has and hasn\u2019t bought: In just the past week, the agency has had to issue three retractions to local media after spokespeople claimed that warehouses had been acquired \u2014 in upstate New York<\/a>, North Jersey<\/a>, and central Tennessee<\/a> \u2014 that, in fact, had not. The agency is taking it in stride, seemingly surprised that it\u2019s being asked these questions at all. \u201cIt should not come as news that ICE will be making arrests in states across the U.S.,\u201d a spokesperson told a Hudson Valley news outlet after one retraction this week, \u201cand is actively working to expand detention space.\u201d<\/p>\n Sign Up for the Curbed Newsletter<\/p>\n A daily mix of stories about cities, city life, and our always evolving neighborhoods and skylines.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n