DHS Surveillance Spending Surges Past 190 Billion Dollars as AI Tools Proliferate and Privacy Oversight Collapses
Internal documents reveal DHS has deployed over 200 AI use cases across immigration enforcement while privacy assessments have dropped to zero in 2026, alarming civil liberties groups and a federal judge who found ICE violated 96 court orders in one month.
Overview
The Department of Homeland Security’s surveillance apparatus has undergone a rapid and largely unscrutinized expansion in 2026, driven by a budget that has nearly tripled to $28.7 billion for ICE alone and an AI inventory that has grown by nearly 40 percent since mid-2025. Internal documents, contract filings, and leaked data paint a picture of an agency assembling one of the largest domestic surveillance infrastructures in American history while the mechanisms designed to check that power have been systematically dismantled.
The Budget Explosion
The scale of spending is difficult to overstate. The One Big Beautiful Bill, signed into law on July 4, 2025, gave DHS more than $191 billion, nearly double what the department received in fiscal year 2024. Within that figure, Customs and Border Protection received $66.8 billion for barrier construction, surveillance systems, and AI-driven inspection tools, while an additional $2.7 billion was earmarked specifically for surveillance technology upgrades along the northern, southern, and maritime borders.
ICE’s own budget reached $28.7 billion in 2025, nearly triple its 2024 allocation, with a three-year spending projection of $56.25 billion in additional funds. The Electronic Frontier Foundation noted that the enforcement agency’s budget alone would make it the fourteenth most-funded military force in the world.
AI Tools Multiply Without Guardrails
A DHS AI inventory released on January 28, 2026, disclosed more than 200 deployed or in-development AI use cases across the department, a nearly 40 percent increase since the previous disclosure in July 2025. ICE added 24 new AI applications in that six-month window. Of the 238 total use cases, 55 were classified as “high-impact,” yet risk management fields in the inventory were more than 80 percent empty, and missing procurement information made it impossible to identify which companies were profiting from the deployments.
At the center of the expansion sits Palantir’s Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement tool, known as ELITE. The application populates a map with potential deportation targets, generates dossiers on individuals, and assigns “confidence scores” to home addresses. It identifies what internal documents call “target rich” areas with high concentrations of people having an immigration nexus. ELITE draws data from the Department of Health and Human Services, including Medicaid records, as well as USCIS databases and CLEAR, a commercial data broker product operated by Thomson Reuters.
ICE entered a $30 million contract with Palantir in April 2025 to build ImmigrationOS, an augmented platform designed to streamline apprehension operations, monitor visa overstays with near-real-time visibility, and provide logistical deportation support. The broader sole-source Investigative Case Management contract has ballooned to over $145 million through September 2027, consolidating data from the FBI, DEA, ATF, and the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System into searchable individual dossiers.
The Surveillance Stack
Beyond Palantir, the department has assembled a layered surveillance infrastructure spanning phone extraction, social media monitoring, street-level tracking, and biometric identification.
On the phone surveillance front, ICE renewed an $11 million contract with Cellebrite for device unlocking and complete data extraction, including apps, location history, photos, notes, call records, and text messages. A $3 million contract with Magnet Forensics provides Graykey phone-unlocking technology, and a reactivated $2 million contract with Paragon Solutions supplies Graphite spyware capable of harvesting messages from encrypted chat applications.
For internet and social media monitoring, a $5 million Pen Link contract covers Webloc location tracking and Tangles social media analysis. Fivecast received $4.2 million for its ONYX tool, which conducts what contract documents describe as “automated, continuous and targeted collection” across social media platforms and the dark web. ICE has also allocated between $20 million and $50 million for a 24/7 social media monitoring center staffed by more than 30 agents.
Street-level surveillance relies on a $6 million Thomson Reuters and Motorola contract for automated license plate readers, a $10 million Clearview AI facial recognition contract, and the Mobile Fortify application, which checks photographs against a database of 200 million images. Field agents have also been observed using Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses for surveillance purposes.
Oversight in Freefall
The expansion of surveillance capabilities has coincided with a collapse in the oversight mechanisms designed to constrain them. Privacy Impact Assessments, the primary tool for evaluating whether new surveillance programs comply with legal requirements, dropped from 24 filings in 2024 to 8 in 2025. In 2026, no assessments have been filed.
DHS privacy officers who objected to what they described as the mislabeling of records were recently ousted from their positions. Inspector General Joseph Cuffari reported that DHS “has systematically obstructed” oversight work. The department’s Civil Rights office has been, in the assessment of outside observers, “severely diminished” under the current administration.
A federal judge in Minnesota documented the consequences of this oversight vacuum in stark terms, finding that ICE had violated 96 court orders in 74 cases and stating that “ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.” The ACLU filed suit documenting suspicionless stops and racial profiling tied to the deployment of these surveillance tools.
Data Exposure and Transparency
In early March 2026, the nonprofit transparency collective DDoSecrets published data relating to contracts between DHS, ICE, and more than 6,000 companies, providing the first comprehensive public accounting of the commercial relationships underpinning the surveillance infrastructure. Meanwhile, the DHS Inspector General launched an audit titled “DHS’ Security of Biometric Data and Personally Identifiable Information,” investigating potential privacy abuses in ICE’s surveillance and biometric data programs.
The ACLU has identified what it calls a troubling pattern: the consolidation of data into centralized individual dossiers, the use of private-sector data to circumvent warrant requirements, and a lack of transparency regarding selection criteria and algorithmic bias in tools like ELITE.
What Comes Next
The surveillance buildup is accelerating. DHS plans to install AI upgrades in 148 existing uncrewed camera towers along the border in 2026 and deploy an additional 50 next-generation towers equipped with longer-range cameras, electro-optical sensors, radar, and LIDAR. The towers will use on-device image recognition trained on 10 to 20 years of border operational data to classify objects, including distinguishing between a person, a person carrying a rifle, and a person carrying a backpack. Congress allocated $2.7 billion for these border surveillance upgrades.
With privacy oversight at its lowest point in the department’s history and spending at its highest, the gap between the technical capabilities being deployed and the legal frameworks meant to govern them continues to widen. Whether congressional oversight, judicial intervention, or public pressure can close that gap before the infrastructure becomes permanent remains an open question.