Shireen Akram-Boshar, Truthout.
DHS doesn’t just buy surveillance tech, but also helps create it through a billion-dollar research incubator.
A new report has outlined the massive expansion in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s use of surveillance technologies and partnerships with technology companies during President Donald Trump’s second term.
The report, released this week by Mijente, Just Futures Law, and Surveillance Resistance Lab, explains that billions of dollars of taxpayer funds have been diverted for Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contracts with surveillance and technology companies. DHS runs both ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
“A key sector of tech funded by venture capital has positioned itself as visioning and directing the war machine and asserts that AI is vital to US national security and the economy,” the report states. This has facilitated increasingly close ties between “tech oligarchs” and the government, as seen in the case of Peter Thiel – co-founder of Palantir – and Elon Musk, among others.
The report tracked ICE and CBP contracts with 11 surveillance technology companies from 2013 to 2026, and found that funding awarded to these firms doubled from 2024 to 2025 to over $310 million, and spiked further in 2026 to $513 million. This was particularly driven by contracts to Palantir, for surveillance technology, and defense company Anduril, for border towers, drones, and related AI surveillance systems.
Importantly, the report also says that DHS “does not simply purchase technologies once they have been developed,” but “actively helps shape the innovation ecosystem that produces the surveillance and enforcement technologies it seeks to deploy.” It does this through a billion-dollar incubator that funds research and partnerships with companies as they develop their surveillance technology – helping them become major surveillance tech companies.
The report maps out the “top 10 categories of surveillance technology” used by DHS, ICE, and CBP to “target, criminalize, and deport” immigrants. These include data brokers – companies like LexisNexis that sell data on millions of people to customers including ICE, which then uses the data to “circumvent sanctuary city protections.” Then, data analytics companies, first among them Palantir, sort and analyze the data.
The report calls Palantir “the backbone of ICE data surveillance.” Palantir, a military contractor that was founded through CIA venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, has developed both ImmigrationOS and ELITE, software platforms that track migrants and map neighborhoods and potential deportation targets.
The report states that since the start of Trump’s second term, Palantir has received over $1.8 billion in government funding, including $81 million from ICE in 2025 and $97 million from ICE in 2026 – followed by a $1 billion purchase agreement this year. ImmigrationOS and ELITE were both developed under ICE contracts with Palantir.
Other crucial surveillance technology used by ICE and DHS includes web scraping and social media surveillance; facial recognition and biometric identification; technology that surveils vehicles and drivers; cellphone tracking and location data; and drone surveillance. Each of these mechanisms entails lucrative contracts with technology companies.
Applications like Mobile Fortify, used by ICE and CBP agents to take pictures of people they arrest and check their identity against an AI-based database, have received scrutiny recently due to their high rate of error, as well as their use against legal observers. But DHS has admitted that MobileFortify is just one of many, and that it uses more than 10 AI-based facial recognition tools.
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