DHS awards $25M no-bid contract to BI2 for 1,500+ iris scanners to identify immigrants

On May 22, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security awarded BI2 Technologies a $25.1 million no-bid contract — posted to SAM.gov — for more than 1,500 iris-scanning devices and continuous access to BI2's biometric database of over five million booking records. The award is roughly five times the value and nearly eight times the device count of DHS's prior contract with the Massachusetts firm, a $4.6 million September 2025 deal for 200 units. ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations division is to receive the devices by late June. The award documents did not require the system to clear FedRAMP, the federal cloud-security review for systems handling sensitive data, and described no independent audit, no congressional notification, and no outside review of how scans would be retained, shared with other agencies, or matched against existing databases. NPR reported BI2 did not respond to multiple inquiries about its ICE work.

The contract expands ICE's biometric collection capabilities in the context of an active mass-deportation push. NPR documented the case of Norelly Mejías Cáceres, a Chicago resident with a pending asylum claim who was detained during a Black-Hawk-supported pre-dawn raid on her apartment building; she said that after she fainted and was crying, agents told her to open her eyes wide while a smartphone was pointed at her face. Her attorney, University of Chicago law professor Nicole Hallett, told NPR that officers had no prior identifying information about Mejías before using the device, and that "the only way they were able to identify people was to illegally arrest them and then use this technology in order to identify them." Mejías was deported and is now in Venezuela; her case is the subject of an administrative claim against the federal government filed by the University of Chicago Immigrants' Rights Clinic.

This archive's taxonomy does not have a dedicated mass-biometric- surveillance slug. The procurement is recorded here under targeting-marginalized-communities — enforcement-and-surveillance infrastructure aimed at immigrant populations — and under procurement-irregularities for the no-bid award concentrating an unusually large share of the federal iris-recognition stack with a single private vendor and bypassing the competitive-pricing and oversight controls of normal procurement. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Cooper Quintin warned NPR that the same database could be used to expand iris collection to anyone ICE detains, including protesters; NPR has separately documented ICE officers taking DNA from legal observers and demonstrators in earlier reporting.