The defense contractor that just won a $12 million deal to build an AI-powered system to track immigrants for ICE appears to have invented some of the very credentials that helped it win the contract — including a lead computer scientist whose photo was lifted from a stock image site — without removing the watermark — and at least one “partner” who says they never worked with the company at all.
That’s the picture emerging from new reporting by The Lever, which last month revealed that ICE had awarded a $12.2 million no-bid contract to a little-known firm called Edge Ops LLC.
The contract pays Edge Ops to deploy “Project SAFE HAVEN,” a surveillance system the company markets as a “question-based AI interface” that uses “persistent passive data collection” to map immigrants’ daily routines, real-time locations, and “patterns of life,” then sort them into categories of suspected criminality.
According to The Lever‘s original reporting, the tool is built to pull data from Wi-Fi networks, cellphones, and smartwatches to build “target profiles” of individuals and link them to alleged gangs or cartels. It’s the kind of military-grade tracking technology once reserved for overseas counterterrorism operations — now being aimed at immigrant communities inside the United States.
A Website That Quietly Disappeared
After The Lever‘s April story exposed the contract, Edge Ops scrubbed its own website. Every reference to Project SAFE HAVEN vanished. So did the company’s published list of leadership and past clients.
When reporter Katya Schwenk took a closer look at what had been there before the purge, she found that several of the people and projects Edge Ops had used to sell itself to the federal government don’t appear to check out.
The headshot the company had been using for its supposed “lead computer scientist” was a stock photo. The watermark was still visible on the woman’s face.
“Jennifer L. Piccerillo” had no biographical details that could be verified anywhere online — no LinkedIn profile, no published research, no employment history. That entire executive profile has now been deleted from the company’s site.
In another case, Edge Ops publicly claimed it had partnered with another company on wildfire detection technology. When The Lever contacted the supposed partner, the company said it had no such relationship and was not working with Edge Ops on anything.
Why This Matters
A federal vendor using a stock photo for a fake executive and listing partnerships that the supposed partners deny is not a minor bookkeeping problem. It is the kind of thing that, in a functioning procurement system, would have stopped a contract before it was signed.
Instead, Edge Ops was awarded $12 million without going through standard competitive bidding — and only had its claims scrutinized after a journalist started asking questions.
The deal is part of a broader spending spree at ICE. Last year’s Republican megabill handed the agency a $75 billion windfall, an unprecedented sum that the agency has been burning through on detention beds, surveillance tools, and contracts with private prison corporations and major tech firms.
The Edge Ops contract is a smaller line item in that surge, but it points to a more troubling pattern: as ICE money pours out the door, the bar for who gets to handle some of the most sensitive surveillance work in the country appears to be dropping.
The human stakes of that should not be lost in the procurement details. Project SAFE HAVEN is designed to map where immigrants live, where they work, who they spend time with, what routes they walk, and what devices they carry.
It will then sort them — using an opaque AI system built by a company that cannot verify its own staff — into categories that may determine who gets surveilled, detained, or deported.
People who came to this country looking for safety are being treated as targets to be plotted on a map. The Trump administration already sent over 200 Venezuelans to a torture prison in El Salvador — knowing 70% of them had never committed a crime.
Now immigrants are going to be under surveillance regardless of whether or not they have a criminal record. The fact that the company doing the surveillance may not even be what it claims to be only deepens the alarm.
Edge Ops has not responded publicly to questions about the discrepancies on its now-scrubbed website. ICE has not said whether it independently verified the company’s credentials before issuing the contract, or whether it plans to review the award in light of The Lever’s findings.
For now, $12 million in taxpayer money is flowing to a firm that scrubbed its own marketing pages as soon as a reporter started looking into them.
