A French IT and engineering firm that provides US immigration authorities with IT solutions used to support deportations.
Capgemini is a French company, based in Paris, that provides information technology (IT) services to government and commercial clients in the retail, energy, financial, and telecommunications sectors. It has commercial partnerships with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce.
Capgemini works with militaries and law enforcement agencies. For example, in 2021, the company announced that it would provide IT, cloud, and artificial intelligence (AI) services to London’s Metropolitan Police as its “digital policing” partner. One year prior, the company began working for the U.K. Ministry of Defence. Between 2003 and February 2024, the company also held contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) worth $110.5 million, including a 2020 contract for supporting the Navy’s use of Salesforce software.
The company has provided IT services to U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Most of these have been directly related to ICE’s division responsible for the detention and deportation of immigrants, Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO). DHS first contracted the company in 2005 for “reengineering the immigration enforcement process.” Capgemini holds three contracts worth a potential $59.2 million for ERO IT upgrades, program support services, and call center services. One of these contracts includes enhancements to ERO’s Alternatives to Detention program (ATD). ATD is an e-carceration program run by BI Inc., a subsidiary of private prison company GEO Group, through which more than 350,000 people are required to use ankle monitors, biometric smartphone applications, and/or voice recognition technology while waiting for their immigration court proceedings to conclude.
In another example directly related to immigrant detention and deportation, ICE contracted Capgemini for its “planning and detention management efforts,” including services related to “ERO ground transportation activities” aimed at replacing “short haul flights with ground transportation.” This 2018 contract, which ended in 2023, was worth $50.9 million.
In 2017, Capgemini published a press release stating that it played a “critical role in assisting ERO with multiple aspects of strategy development, capacity planning and forecasting,” and that the company’s services could “be used to meet ERO’s business needs in managing the detainee removal process.”
Capgemini also provides “bed planning” and capacity expansion analysis for ICE jails. The company provides maintenance and enhancements to ICE’s jail database to assist in the “automation of the detention facility review process.” ICE has stated that Capgemini “provides all the planning management support tools, labor, and materials necessary to assist in effective capacity forecasting, and reporting of current and future detention capacity requirements.”
A 2021 report issued by DHS’s Office of the Inspector General, however, argued that ICE had failed to monitor one of the contracts listed above, overpaying by $769,869 in labor costs. Furthermore, according to the report, ICE did not “ensure the contractor met the statement of work (SOW) requirements for staff skill sets, education, and work experience, nor did it ensure all contractor staff worked at the designated place of performance.”
In addition, Capgemini signed a 2016 $60.4 million contract with DHS’s Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to continue developing and testing the agency’s IT infrastructure. This included the Electronic Immigration System (ELIS), the agency’s electronic case management system for reviewing immigration applications. ELIS includes background checks and biometric information, which it cross-references with data in CBP’s TECS, an information sharing platform that immigration agents use to screen persons upon entry into the U.S.
ELIS also feeds its information into DHS’s Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology System (HART) and its predecessor, the Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT), a massive biometrics database that collects and analyzes facial images, DNA profiles, iris scans, digital fingerprints, and voice prints, in combination with other biographic information, in order to construct unique profiles of hundreds of millions of people.