A recent map of federal contractors working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement included one company from Charlottesville, drawing local attention on social media amid ICE’s brutal actions in Minneapolis and other American cities.
On January 16, the news site Sludge mapped every U.S. company that has begun or expanded contracts with ICE since President Donald Trump’s January 20, 2025, inauguration. Using data from USAspending.gov, the map listed more than $3 million in ICE contracts for Charlottesville-based GovSmart, Inc.
CEO Brent Lillard co-founded GovSmart with CFO Hamza Durrani in 2009. Lillard says the company handles more than $500 million in orders from local, state, and federal agencies each year, and regularly contributes to a host of local and national charities, including a $13,000 donation in 2021 to help clients at The Haven obtain ID documents.
“We resell widely used, commercial off-the-shelf software used every day by private companies, hospitals, universities, and civilian agencies,” Lillard says. GovSmart’s ICE contracts include licenses for Tableau data dashboards, AutoCAD architectural design software, real estate management software, Splunk databases, and Smarty address verification.
GovSmart bids for federal contracts under a “multi-award vehicle.” Contractors pre-apply to join a large pool of bidders for government orders. When agencies request items, contractors like GovSmart compete to provide them. Most of the money contractors receive goes toward purchasing the requested products. “We only win when we are cheaper than all of the other contractors,” Lillard says. “Our average [profit] margin is very slim, similar to a credit card fee.”
USAspending.gov data shows that as of January 25, GovSmart received more than $232 million from 981 federal contracts in fiscal 2025 and fiscal 2026. Contracts from ICE, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services totalled nearly $39 million, of which roughly $38.3 million was awarded after Trump took office.
In that period, USCIS was the largest source of GovSmart’s federal contracts by dollar amount, at $33.8 million. The agency processes applications for visas, citizenship, asylum, and refugee status. Under Trump, USCIS has gained its own armed law enforcement unit and begun reviewing potential immigrants’ social media for “anti-American or antisemitic views.” Last July, it released detailed plans to revoke citizenship from babies born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants, in violation of the 14th Amendment.
ICE represented GovSmart’s 18th largest source of contract funds, at $3.19 million. CBP ranked 25th with $1.97 million.
Twelve of GovSmart’s 34 contracts with these agencies began under the Biden administration, and nine began before Trump’s November 2024 re-election. Only one contract—$157,605 for a directional radio antenna used to detect other radio signals, for CBP’s operations at Fort Bliss, Texas—did not involve off-the-shelf computer software or hardware.
USAspending.gov lists another Charlottesville business, Bluestone Analytics, as an ICE contractor. But its four open contracts for software or services to help track cybercrimes all appear to have been fulfilled before fiscal 2025. While USAspending.gov doesn’t break out sub-agency awards, the descriptions of Bluestone’s contracts suggest they came from Homeland Security Investigations, a highly trained subset of ICE that focuses on serious transnational crimes. Per government records, Bluestone has received no funds from ICE in fiscal 2025 or 2026.
In the 1930s, IBM, via a German subsidiary, leased early computers and customized punch cards to the Nazi government. The data that technology gathered on Germany’s Jews and other minorities enabled the Nazis’ later campaign of mass imprisonment and murder. “It’s a deeply flawed analogy,” Lillard says, when asked about potential parallels. “We do not control how agencies architect their systems, what data they ingest, or how that data is used. The appropriate debate is about public policy and oversight — not equating suppliers of general-purpose software with historical actors who knowingly supported crimes against humanity.”
When asked his opinion of ICE’s actions in Minneapolis, Lillard declined to comment. “My personal views are my own,” he says, “and it would be inappropriate—and potentially harmful—to conflate those views with the positions of the company or the people who work here.”
Posts on Lillard’s public Facebook page include praise for libertarian Congressman Thomas Massie, and criticism of both Republicans and Democrats, usually regarding expansion of or lack of oversight for government spending.
Lillard says his company cannot cancel ongoing contracts without severe penalties. “A termination for default or debarment can prevent a contractor from ever doing business with the federal [government] in the future,” he says, “and, in our case, result in the loss of 90-plus jobs and community investment.”
Going forward, Lillard says GovSmart won’t decline to bid on contracts from any given agency. “We do not take positions on policy, nor do we selectively engage based on the mission of a particular agency,” he says. “When competition lowers costs or improves performance, the public benefits. That principle applies uniformly across the federal government.”
