US Immigration and Customs Enforcement

The DHS 2025 AI Use Case Inventory (entry DHS-2666, as consolidated by the Office of Management and Budget) lists "License Plate Capture and Analysis" at ICE as deployed from 19 September 2025, high-impact and purchased from Motorola. It says the system processes images and metadata from ICE-owned and commercial licence plate cameras, using computer vision and optical character recognition to read plates and record time, location, make, model, colour and visible features, and that a natural language interface powered by a large language model turns users' questions into database searches and summarises a vehicle's sightings; it states that plate records are not automatically linked to driver or vehicle registration databases. DHS Privacy Impact Assessment DHS/ICE/PIA-039 covers ICE's use of licence plate reader data from a commercial service for administrative and criminal law enforcement by Enforcement and Removal Operations and Homeland Security Investigations: the original assessment (19 March 2015) announced the plan to buy access; the update of 27 December 2017 documented a contract giving both units query access; and the update of 21 May 2021 added geographic queries (Homeland Security Investigations only), partial-plate queries and a mobile app with a phone scan feature. Biometric Update (18 November 2025), from procurement records, reported that the December 2017 award went to Thomson Reuters' West Publishing Corporation and was worth more than $7 million, that ICE later paid Thomson Reuters nearly $5 million for plate data, and that ICE issued a purchase order to Motorola Solutions for four mobile plate reader units for Enforcement and Removal Operations, worth about $95,500. The inventory date applies to the AI-enabled system; the PIA does not say when ICE's use of plate data began.