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 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.