U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has awarded a 25.1 million dollar no-bid contract to BI2 Technologies for iris biometric recognition systems, more than five times the value of the prior contract between the two parties from eight months earlier. The deal covers more than 1,500 mobile iris scanners for field deployment, access to BI2’s biometric mobile application, and continuing access to the company’s iris database, according to the procurement records posted on SAM.gov.
The award gives ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division iris recognition capability in the field through devices that agents can carry, paired with a mobile application that lets them check captured iris images against BI2’s central repository. The repository, built up over years through the company’s partnerships with local sheriff’s offices, holds more than five million booking records, and ICE will have continuous access to it under the contract. Deployment of the devices could begin by late June.
The procurement is structured as a sole-source award, the no-bid mechanism that lets a federal agency contract with a single vendor without a competitive solicitation. The contract documentation does not require the system to clear the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, the federal cloud security baseline, before deployment, and it does not describe any independent audit, congressional notification, or external review of how the iris system would be used. Civil liberties researchers and reporters covering the procurement have flagged the absence of those oversight mechanisms.
The contract extends a pattern that ICE established in the months before this award. The agency previously signed a sole-source contract with BI2 in 2025 for iris biometric systems, including the company’s Inmate Identification and Recognition System and Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System platforms. ICE has separately been expanding its mobile iris-scanning capability for use in the field, and the new award scales both the device count and the central-repository access materially.
The new contract sits inside a broader expansion of biometric tooling across US federal immigration enforcement. By placing iris-recognition devices into agents’ hands and giving them mobile access to a multi-million-record repository hosted by a private vendor, the deal anchors the operational identification workflow on infrastructure that is built and managed outside the agency itself.
Sources: NPR
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
