The second-least populous state in the country, the federal government is also taking advantage of Vermont’s remoteness to conduct surveillance on immigrants.

The National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center is housed at the White Cap Business Park in Williston, a rural town in Vermont with a population of about 10,000. Activists say it is one of two such centers, with the other one located in Laguna Niguel, California, based in conservative Orange County.

The Law Enforcement Support Center is also located nearby, on Williston’s Harvest Lane, where ICE operates a hotline for anyone across the country who wants to call in to report “suspicious activity.” The hotline center boasts that it is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to process 55,000 hotline tips annually.

The capability to process mass amounts of data is dizzying. Both facilities are part of a “Targeting Operations Division” that processes 1.55 million biometric and biographic queries annually. ICE claims to have access to 340,000 records. The agency communicates with more than 13,000 law enforcement agencies throughout the country, many of them through an expanding network of 287(g) agreements that incentivize collaboration between ICE and local police. In 2021, the division analyzed records of some 7.7 million people for the “identification and removal of criminal noncitizens in the United States.”