ICE/CBP Surveillance Tech Spending Hits $513M in 2026; Palantir Named 'Backbone' With $1B Follow-On Agreement

A joint report from Mijente, Just Futures Law, and Surveillance Resistance Lab (published as The Tech Behind ICE: Oligarchs, Immigration Enforcement and the Threat to Democracy) documents ICE and CBP contracts with 11 surveillance firms reaching $513M in 2026, up from $310M in 2025. Palantir is identified as “the backbone of ICE data surveillance,” receiving $97M from ICE in 2026 plus a follow-on $1 billion purchase agreement. Palantir’s ImmigrationOS builds deportation target dossiers; its ELITE platform maps neighborhoods and assigns confidence scores to individuals’ home addresses. The broader arsenal includes data brokers (LexisNexis), more than 10 AI-based facial recognition systems, social media surveillance, and cellphone location tracking. DHS has also built a billion-dollar incubator that actively shapes the commercial surveillance ecosystem upstream of its own procurement.

This is the aggregate spending figure underlying individual contract stories the timeline has tracked piecemeal through 2026, including the illegal Medicaid-to-Palantir data transfer disclosed three days later (2026-07-17–ice-medicaid-palantir-illegal-data-transfer) — the report converts scattered contract disclosures into a single documented total, confirming that Palantir’s role is now structural rather than incidental to ICE’s enforcement capacity.

Independent verification, 2026-08-19 (ticket ledger-lead-source-or-refute-the-513m-ice-surveillance-figure)

The Guardian independently confirmed the same $310M(2025)/$513M(2026) figures in its own June 24, 2026 coverage of this report, naming Palantir and Anduril as the two vendors driving the 2025→2026 spike (Anduril for border towers/drones/sensors; Palantir for data analytics/targeting) — corroborating this entry’s figures from a second tier-1 outlet independent of Truthout.

USAspending spot-checks on Palantir and Anduril turned up real, large, DHS-tagged awards with FY2026 action dates and PSC codes consistent with the report’s narrative rather than generic IT: Anduril contract 70B02C26F00000035 (award 353697130), $362,974,500, DHS, delivery order 2025-12-25→2027-06-17, PSC Y1BG “Construction of Electronic and Communications Facilities”; Palantir contract 70CTD022FR0000170 (award 291199463), $150,703,825, DHS, delivery order 2022-09-26→2026-05-04, PSC DA01 “IT/Business Application Development Support Services.” These corroborate the underlying mechanism but do not reproduce the exact $513M total: cascade-search usaspending has no ICE/CBP-only sub-agency filter (DHS-wide only), and award total-value is a multi-year contract ceiling, not single-fiscal-year obligated spend — the two are not directly comparable, and the FY2026-dated DHS awards found for just these two vendors alone summed higher (~$852.7M by award-ceiling) than the report’s $513M total across all 11 companies.

Caution for future ledger passes: a separate ledger story (2026-07-01--dhs-facial-recognition-1300-agencies-ice-surveillance, dropped) cited NPR’s March 25, 2026 surveillance/data-brokers investigation as the tier-1 source for this $513M figure. Direct text extraction of that NPR article found no occurrence of “513,” “310,” or “surveillance technology spending” anywhere in it — the figure is not in that piece. The correct attribution is this Mijente/Just Futures Law/Surveillance Resistance Lab report, via Truthout and The Guardian, not NPR.