OTTAWA — The federal government is subsidizing an Ottawa tech company that provides wiretapping tools to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency leading President Donald Trump’s violent mass-deportation campaign.

In December, AI and Digital Innovation Minister Evan Solomon pledged $1 million to help JSI “commercialize AI-enabled solutions for law enforcement and security agencies to automate the review and analysis of large datasets.”

As Canada backs its artificial intelligence and defence sectors with public dollars, qualms about who buys the tools, weapons and services that firms in those industries make are likely to come up again and again.

JSI has done millions of dollars’ worth of business with ICE over the past 20 years, selling it things like surveillance equipment, software, maintenance and support services. A U.S. government contracting database shows that it has an open contract with the agency that’s worth up to US$23.4 million for “operations and maintenance support” for digital taps on electronic communications.

JSI’s latest contract began last March and runs for a year and a half, but could be extended as far as 2030. It follows a similar contract that ran from 2019 to 2025, according to the U.S. data.

At the time the current contract began, the Department of Homeland Security was already boasting of the thousands of arrests it had made in service of mass deportations.

More recently, Congress has allocated US$170 billion to immigration and border enforcement over four years. Along with the separate U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency, ICE has stormed through multiple cities—rounding up illegal migrants, legal ones and citizens; stopping people to demand their papers; and fighting protesters and passersby, including lethally.

ICE began its current operation in Minnesota, its most violent yet, in early December 2025. Solomon announced the funding for JSI on Dec. 17, as part of a $19-million package of federal funding for companies and researchers in southern Ontario working on AI tools.

The company advertises its AI-driven analytics’ value in yielding investigative breakthroughs already. Its platform can “quickly and seamlessly consolidate data from any source—from telephony, location and IP data to [open source intelligence], dark web and financial transactions including blockchain—for analysis in near real time,” its website says.

JSI is headquartered in the western Ottawa tech district of Kanata, but it says it has more than 400 employees in offices around the world. Those include one in Chantilly, Va., on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., at the address listed in the U.S. government’s contract database.

Besides ICE, the U.S. data shows JSI does extensive work for the Drug Enforcement Administration and has had contracts with the FBI, IRS, and other U.S. agencies.

The 2025 fiscal year set a record for JSI’s U.S. federal government business, according to the data, with agreements worth as much as US$48.2 million—more than three times the work it booked the year before, and topping its previous record of US$41.5 million in 2019.

“Our company is committed to operating with integrity, in full compliance with applicable laws, regulations, and export controls,” JSI vice-president Monique Smith told The Logic in an email. “As a matter of policy, we do not comment on specific customer relationships, particularly those involving any government or law enforcement agencies.”

A spokesperson for Solomon, Sofia Ouslis, said the minister “takes ethical considerations seriously, including concerns related to the responsible use of technology, particularly when they are deployed by law-enforcement or security agencies in different jurisdictions.”

Ouslis went on: “Government support is therefore grounded in clear principles: strengthening Canadian innovation and jobs, ensuring compliance with Canadian law and export controls, and upholding commitments to responsible AI, democratic values, and the rule of law—without endorsing or directing specific customers or uses.”

A 2022 study of ICE’s data collecting tools by the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown University’s law school, titled “American Dragnet,” mentioned its use of JSI’s wiretapping tools in passing. Wiretaps were one of many ways the agency had “created a surveillance infrastructure that enables it to pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time,” the report said.

“Despite the incredible scope and evident civil rights implications of ICE’s surveillance practices, the agency has managed to shroud those practices in near-total secrecy, evading enforcement of even the handful of laws and policies that could be invoked to impose limitations,” it said.

The centre’s executive director, Emily Tucker, co-wrote the study. At the time she and her team did the work (and still today, in theory), wiretapping was one of the less troubling ways for ICE to gather data, Tucker said in an interview, because U.S. law is clear that eavesdropping on someone’s calls requires a warrant signed by a judge.

But 2026 is not 2022. “I don’t think that this administration cares at all about the rule of law, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they are using the technology in a way that just simply flouts the requirement to get a judicial order,” she said.

(Tucker, a dual Canadian-U.S. citizen who was born in Toronto, spoke to The Logic before the Associated Press reported on a whistleblower’s account of an ICE memo asserting that its agents can enter homes without judges’ warrants.)

Much of the centre’s report focused on how ICE used sources like commercial databases, state records, utility bills and social media posts to compile dossiers on any number of people. Since Trump returned to the White House, Tucker said, U.S. government procurements in this area have emphasized interoperability, so that data from multiple sources can more easily be combined.

Even without eavesdropping directly on conversations, phone data—such as locations and what numbers calls and texts originate from and go to—contributes to authorities’ understandings of relationships and connections.

“They want to build an ‘everything’ database,” Tucker said.

Other Canadian companies sell to ICE, too.

Like JSI, Canadian information giant Thomson Reuters has done millions of dollars of business with the agency over the years. It has an open contract with the agency, worth up to US$22.8 million, for what the U.S. government labels a “law enforcement investigative database subscription.”

That work has long been controversial. CEO Steve Hasker told The Logic in 2023 that in the first Trump administration, Thomson Reuters continued to sell the Department of Homeland Security the same services it had under Barack Obama’s presidency, and “we were swept up in a broader set of problems to which we have not contributed.”

Hasker said in that interview that Thomson Reuters no longer had an ICE contract, though the company followed up at the time to say that in fact it did.

The current database contract, begun in 2021, lasts until the end of May 2026.

A page on Thomson Reuters’ website that explained and defended its services to police agencies turns up in internet searches and was archived as recently as Jan. 15, but has been taken down.

Thomson Reuters did not respond to The Logic’s new questions about its ICE dealings and what happened to the web page.

GardaWorld, based in Montreal, supplies security services at the “Alligator Alcatraz” detention site in Florida. Toronto armoured-car manufacturer Roshel is selling vehicles to ICE (produced at a U.S. facility). And last week, The Globe and Mail reported on a $95,000 pilot project between Vancouver’s Hootsuite and U.S. federal agencies, including ICE, for social media management. Hootsuite kiboshed a previous deal with ICE in 2020 after an employee backlash.

Tucker said companies selling to the U.S. government need to make their own careful judgments about whether their products and services are being used legally—let alone morally.

“If I were a corporation selling surveillance technology and I had come up during the era of all of the previous presidents, I would [now] think to myself, ‘OK, I actually cannot rely on the government to be the entity that’s holding me accountable to the law right now. I have to do that work myself to ensure that I’m not violating the law in this partnership.’”