After the Lever reported last month that President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcers awarded a defense vendor a $12 million contract to map out immigrants’ routines and real-time locations, the company, Edge Ops LLC, overhauled its website.Gone was all mention of “Project SAFE HAVEN,” the “question-based AI interface” that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) planned to use to track immigrants and categorize them as potential threats. But that wasn’t all: the company also scrubbed details about its leadership and past clients.Now a Lever review raises questions about whether several of the people and undertakings that Edge Ops advertised in the lead-up to its multimillion-dollar government deal actually exist.In one case, a company that Edge Ops has claimed to have partnered with on wildfire detection technology told the Lever that it was not working with the vendor at all.In another, Edge Ops used a stock photo for the headshot of its ostensible lead computer scientist, for whom it included no easily identifiable biographical information.Until mid-April, Edge Ops’ website featured a stock photo for the headshot of its lead computer scientist; all information about the executive has now been removed.While these references have vanished from Edge Ops’ website, questions about the company and its new millions still linger.An opaque vendor evading standard competitive bidding to win a valuable ICE contract — this is largely par for the course amid Trump’s immigration spending blitz. The GOP megabill last year handed ICE an unprecedented $75 billion windfall. The agency has since gone on a spending spree to build out its surveillance and detention infrastructure, to the benefit of long-standing ICE vendors like private prison companies and tech giants.But the case of Edge Ops — which has Pentagon ties but no apparent federal contracting experience as a company, and which was apparently founded to own a sailboat — brings up fresh…
