ICE expands vehicle surveillance capabilities with forensics platform, covert GPS trackers

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is moving to maintain two complementary technologies capable of reconstructing where vehicles have been and following where they go.

Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) announced that it intends to renew its existing Berla iVe vehicle forensics platform, which can recover navigation histories, GPS track logs and information left behind by phones connected to vehicle infotainment systems.

A day later, HSI posted another sole-source procurement notice for “specialized devices” from Ensurity Mobile Corp., the company that supplied its Technical Operations Unit with hundreds of covert GPS tracking devices last year.

The two procurements illuminate different sides of vehicle surveillance.

Berla iVe allows investigators who have lawfully obtained access to a vehicle to examine the digital history stored inside it. Ensurity’s trackers allow investigators, acting under applicable legal authority, to follow a vehicle over time without maintaining a surveillance team continuously behind it.

HSI’s Office of Acquisition said in its August 28 notice that Berla Corporation of Annapolis, Maryland, is the only reasonably available source for renewal of the agency’s existing iVe hardware and software.

The notice does not disclose the anticipated value, number of licenses or which HSI offices use the platform.

Modern infotainment and telematics systems can retain considerably more information than radio settings.

Depending on the vehicle, Berla says iVe can recover recent destinations, navigation histories, saved locations and timestamped GPS track logs.

Vehicle systems can also retain records associated with doors, lights and other events and identify phones and devices connected through Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or USB.

Where information has been synchronized with the vehicle, investigators may recover contact lists, call logs and SMS messages. Some systems also retain where the vehicle was when a particular Bluetooth device connected.

That does not mean iVe necessarily extracts information directly from a phone that was once paired with a car. It analyzes information the vehicle itself copied, generated or retained during the interaction.

A Bellevue, Washington, investigation recently illustrated the distinction. Police examining the infotainment system of a stolen BMW X6 recovered telephone information left inside the vehicle, including call activity and a contact list containing nearly 200 entries, according to the Bellevue Police Foundation.

Investigators said the information helped them identify a suspect within minutes.

A peer-reviewed Society of Automotive Engineers studysimilarly found timestamped GPS track logs inside a BMW infotainment system. Researchers using Berla iVe reconstructed portions of the vehicle’s route and calculated speed from recorded geographic coordinates.

Federal contracting records show ICE already possesses the technology. The agency awarded Berla a roughly $130,000 purchase order in 2025 for software described as being used by HSI to assist cybercrime investigations. The award runs through September 29.

HSI is also maintaining technology capable of collecting location information before investigators ever gain access to the inside of a vehicle.

In September 2025, ICE awarded Ensurity $311,250 for equipment for HSI’s Technical Operations Unit. Contract records show HSI purchased 325 Ensurity trackers, 100 raw chipsets and 325 add-on units using proprietary 4G GPS tracking technology designed to integrate with equipment HSI already possessed.

The equipment was described as supporting covert surveillance and investigative operations.

The new award notice does not expressly say that the latest “specialized devices” are another batch of those trackers, but it establishes that HSI is returning to the same proprietary supplier a year after making the earlier GPS tracker acquisition.

Ensurity’s Traxx software supports real-time tracking, geofencing, location histories and reports. Its current application also includes a “warrant status” indicator for tracking devices.

Together, the Berla and Ensurity procurements show how the automobile has become both a source and a target of digital surveillance. One technology can preserve movement and device information after the fact while the other can generate a record of movement while an investigation is underway.

They also sit beside HSI’s expanding mobile device forensics capability. The agency’s Cyber Crimes Center is separately planning a five-year procurement valued between $50 million and $100 million for Cellebrite products and services used to extract and analyze data from phones, tablets and other electronic devices.

The result is an investigative environment in which a phone, the vehicle to which it was connected and a tracking device attached during surveillance can each reveal a different part of the same movement history.

Article Topics

Ensurity  |  ICE - U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement  |  procurement  |  RFI  |  surveillance  |  U.S. Government  |  vehicle recognition