Last month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement acknowledged for the first time the agency’s growing arsenal of surveillance technology includes spyware. Such tools can remotely hack into phones and have been abused repeatedly by governments around the world that have used them not only to counter national security threats, but also to spy on political rivals, diplomats, human rights activists and journalists.

ICE’s admission of its spyware use, which the agency says has been approved to help its Homeland Security Investigations team disrupt foreign terrorist groups and fentanyl traffickers, comes as critics of the commercial spyware industry are growing concerned that the Trump administration is slowly reversing a previous hard line stance the U.S. government took against the industry in recent years.

“We’re starting to see erosion,” said Steve Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “There’s a concern that in the coming year, months, we could see further changes that would really put a damper on what I think has been a really important effort to try to hold this industry to account.”