‘We should be worried’: report sheds light on ICE’s booming arsenal of hi-tech surveillance tools
TL;DR
A new report from Mijente, Just Futures Law and Surveillance Resistance Lab reviews ICE and CBP contracts with 11 surveillance-tech firms going back to 2013. Awarded money rose to just over $310m in 2025 after doubling from 2024, then hit a record $513m in 2026. Large Palantir and Anduril deals drive the jump, alongside tools for data brokers, facial recognition, social media scraping, phone extraction, drones and border towers.
Nauti's Take
This is not a neutral government audit. It is watchdog work from groups with a clear position.
Still, the hard part is the contract trail: when ICE and CBP pour hundreds of millions into analytics, biometrics and autonomous sensing, the infrastructure will outlive the current immigration fight. AI is not just making administration more efficient here.
It is making enforcement scalable, faster and harder to challenge.
Briefingshow
This shows how AI surveillance moves from border enforcement into everyday life: data brokers, facial recognition and social-media dossiers can affect migrants, protesters and citizens. The core risk is not one tool. It is the mix of huge budgets, weak oversight and private firms turning state power into software workflows.
Sources