ICE Got $28.7 Billion. Here's What It's Buying.

Facial recognition. Phone-hacking spyware. License plate readers. Social media monitoring. ICE's surveillance shopping spree is the biggest in the agency's history, and it targets everyone, not just immigrants.

TL;DR: Congress handed ICE $75 billion over four years through the One Big Beautiful Act. Combined with existing FY2025 funding, ICE now has $28.7 billion this year alone, nearly triple its FY2024 budget. At that level, ICE's annual budget would rank 14th among the world's militaries, between Ukraine and Israel. The agency is using that money to buy surveillance technology at an unprecedented pace: a $10 million Clearview AI facial recognition contract, $30 million to Palantir, $11 million to Cellebrite for phone cracking, $2 million for Paragon spyware that can hack Signal and WhatsApp, and plans for a $20-50 million 24/7 social media monitoring operation. The EFF, Brennan Center, and ACLU are warning this isn't just an immigration enforcement tool: it's a domestic surveillance machine.

Follow the Money

Let's start with the numbers, because they're staggering.[1]

The One Big Beautiful Act gave ICE $75 billion over four years, roughly $18.7 billion per year. On top of the $10 billion Congress already appropriated for fiscal year 2025. That puts ICE at $28.7 billion for this year.[1][2]

For context: ICE spent an estimated $2.8 billion on surveillance programs across a thirteen-year period from 2008 to 2021.[1] Now it has ten times that in a single year.

Two-thirds of the funding ($45 billion over four years) goes to detention. That's a 400% increase over last year's detention budget, enough to lock up over 100,000 people annually. Nearly 90% of ICE detainees are held in for-profit private prisons.[2]

Another $30 billion goes to locating, arresting, and deporting immigrants, with funding to hire 10,000 new ICE officers, a 300% increase.[2]

The Surveillance Shopping List

The EFF documented the contracts in detail. Here's what ICE is buying:[1]

Phone Cracking and Spyware

Cellebrite got an $11 million renewal. Their tools unlock phones and extract everything: messages, location history, encrypted app data. Magnet Forensics scored $3 million for its Graykey phone-unlocking device. And Paragon had its $2 million contract reactivated for Graphite, spyware capable of harvesting encrypted messages from Signal and WhatsApp without the user knowing.[1]

Between April and June 2025, Customs and Border Protection searched 14,899 devices.[1] That's roughly 164 phones cracked per day.

Social Media Monitoring

ShadowDragon's Social Net monitors over 200 websites with persistent access to Facebook and Twitter data. Fivecast got $4.2 million for ONYX, a tool that performs "automated, continuous and targeted collection of multimedia data" from social media, the dark web, and search engines.[1]

And that's just the existing contracts. ICE plans to spend between $20 million and $50 million building a 24/7 social media monitoring office staffed by at least 30 full-time agents.[1]

Street-Level Surveillance

ICE paid Thomson Reuters and Motorola Solutions $6 million for access to automated license plate reader (ALPR) data. They also tap into Flock Safety's ALPR network through local police partnerships.[1]

A 2022 Georgetown Law study found ICE had already scanned the driver's license photos of 1 in 3 American adults, accessed license data for 3 in 4 adults, and could track vehicle movements in cities covering 3 in 4 adults.[1] That was before the budget tripled.

Facial Recognition and Biometrics

Clearview AI has a $10 million contract. ICE also uses Mobile Fortify to scan faces against a 200-million-photo database, and BI2 Technologies for iris scanning.[1]

Location Tracking

Pen Link's $5 million contract includes Webloc, which tracks millions of phone locations through mobile data brokers, and Tangles, which aggregates social media, location history, and social networks into one dashboard.[1]

Cell-Site Simulators

ICE uses cell-site simulators, devices that mimic cell towers to intercept communications. Deployed via TechOps specialty vehicles. Records show 466 deployments between 2017 and 2019, and 1,885 between 2013 and 2017.[1]

The Palantir Connection

At the center of ICE's data machine sits Palantir. The $30 million contract gives ICE the ImmigrationOS platform, a system that links IRS data, immigration records, social media profiles, and commercial databases into a single searchable interface.[1]

Palantir's tools let ICE analyze driver's license scans, extract information from seized phones, cross-search location data, and connect records across federal, state, and private databases.[1] It's the glue that turns individual data points into a surveillance web.

This Isn't Just About Immigration

Here's the part that should worry everyone: these tools don't check citizenship before collecting data.

License plate readers photograph every car that drives by. Facial recognition scans every face in range. Social media monitoring crawls posts from everyone. Cell-site simulators intercept all nearby communications.

The Brennan Center for Justice warns these technologies "could be weaponized against political opponents" and points to the administration's stated willingness to use surveillance against dissent.[2] ICE's social media monitoring includes algorithms that flag posts critical of the agency.[2]

The ACLU has documented that DHS is "circumventing the Constitution by buying data it would normally need a warrant to access."[3] When the government can't legally surveil you, it buys the data from brokers who can.

As the EFF put it: ICE is on a surveillance shopping spree, and American civil liberties are on the clearance rack.[1]

What You Can Do

Use Encrypted Messaging

Signal remains the gold standard, but Paragon's Graphite spyware targets it specifically. Keep your apps updated. Enable disappearing messages. Don't click suspicious links. That's how most spyware gets installed.

Limit Location Tracking

Turn off location services when you don't need them. Use a VPN. Be aware that mobile data brokers sell your location data to companies like Pen Link, which sells it to ICE. Your phone is a tracking device.

Lock Down Social Media

ICE monitors over 200 platforms. Set profiles to private. Audit what's publicly visible. Think before posting. ShadowDragon's tools scrape everything public.

Encrypt Your Devices

Full-disk encryption is your best defense if your phone is seized. Use a strong alphanumeric passcode, not a 4-digit PIN, not biometrics. Cellebrite's tools are powerful, but encryption makes extraction orders of magnitude harder.

Support Organizations Fighting Back

The EFF, ACLU, and Brennan Center are leading the fight against mass surveillance. They need funding. If you can donate, do it.

Contact Your Representatives

Demand oversight of ICE's surveillance contracts. Push for warrant requirements for location data purchases. Ask why a domestic agency needs a military-grade surveillance budget.

References

  1. EFF - ICE Is Going on a Surveillance Shopping Spree (January 2026)
  2. Brennan Center for Justice - Big Budget Act Creates a "Deportation-Industrial Complex" (January 2026)
  3. ACLU - DHS is Circumventing Constitution by Buying Data It Would Normally Need a Warrant to Access
  4. American Immigration Council - ICE Uses a Growing Web of AI Services to Power Its Immigration Enforcement and Surveillance (January 2026)
  5. Cybernews - ICE surveillance tech and hackers pushing back (January 2026)