DHS surveillance spending tops $2.9B as domestic enforcement architecture expands

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has recorded more than $2.9 billion in contract obligations since January 2021 for technologies capable of watching, identifying, locating and compiling detailed profiles of people inside the United States, according to a new Brennan Center for Justice analysis.

An analysis of the Brennan Center’s underlying contract spreadsheet by Biometric Update shows the spending is accelerating. Approximately $1.36 billion in obligations have been recorded since President Donald Trump returned to office, including about $805 million through July 26, 2026—already more than the total identified for any full year from 2021 through 2025.

The spending spans facial recognition and other biometrics, drones, commercial data purchases, cellphone extraction and location tools, and AI-driven analytical platforms that combine information from government and private databases. Rather than documenting a single surveillance technology, the report maps an increasingly integrated enforcement architecture in which multiple systems work together to identify, locate and profile people.

Biometrics account for the largest share

Biometric programs account for approximately $1.1 billion of the obligations identified by the Center, more than any of its other five categories.

Much of that amount supports the expansion and maintenance of DHS’s central biometric infrastructure, including its legacy Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT) and the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology program intended to succeed it.

General Dynamics, Peraton and Science Applications International Corporation are among the principal contractors.

Another large portion went to Amentum and Pluribus Digital for collecting biometric and biographical information from applicants seeking immigration related benefits.

The category also includes mobile identification systems that bring biometric searches out of controlled enrollment centers and into field operations.

Among them is Mobile Fortify, the NEC-developed facial recognition application used by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.

The application allows an officer to photograph someone and compare the image against government biometric holdings while conducting an operation.

The Center also identified $29.7 million in obligations associated with BI2 Technologies, which supplies iris-recognition technology.

The report notes that DHS removed a publicly available department-wide policy governing facial recognition and face capture.

The disappearance of that policy from the department’s website does not by itself establish that it was formally rescinded, but it leaves the public without a clear account of the rules currently governing one of DHS’s fastest growing field capabilities.

Drones extend surveillance into the interior

Video surveillance accounted for approximately $793 million, the second largest category. More than $675 million was obligated through three contracts with General Atomics for CBP’s unmanned aircraft program.

CBP has traditionally described its large drone fleet as supporting border, maritime and overseas missions. Under the second Trump administration, however, DHS aircraft have also been deployed farther inside the country to assist immigration operations and monitor protests.

Footage collected by drones has appeared in the department’s own social media material, according to sources compiled by the Center.

The category also includes nearly $83 million for body-worn and vehicle-mounted cameras and smaller purchases of mobile surveillance equipment.

The report does not argue that every flight or camera deployment is unlawful. It instead shows that equipment acquired under authorities associated with border and immigration enforcement can be repositioned for domestic operations involving people far from a port of entry or international boundary.

Analytics turns collected data into targets

Data analytics accounted for approximately $611 million, making it the third largest category.

Palantir was the leading company in this portion of the market, with nearly $324 million in obligations since January 2021 across its work on ICE analytical and case management systems.

The spreadsheet records a particularly sharp increase in commitments to Palantir, from $20.4 million in 2024 to $162.2 million during 2026 through July 26.

That increase includes ICE’s continued use and expansion of Palantir’s Investigative Case Management platform, ImmigrationOS, and Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE).

ELITE brings potential enforcement targets into a map based interface, connects locations to individual dossiers and assigns confidence scores to addresses.

Reporting and court testimony cited by the Center indicate that officers have used the platform to identify concentrations of people with an “immigration nexus” and plan operations in areas considered likely to yield arrests.

Another major analytical environment is the Repository for Analytics in a Virtualized Environment, known as RAVEn. A DHS privacy assessment describes it as an ICE platform for large, complex analytical projects supporting criminal, civil and administrative enforcement.

Booz Allen Hamilton, Acuity and Alethix have received tens of millions of dollars for work connected to RAVEn. The platform allows investigators to search, organize and compare information drawn from multiple systems instead of querying each database separately.

The Brennan Center also identified about $95 million in obligations related to social media monitoring and open source intelligence tools.

Those analytical systems sit above additional layers of commercially obtained information.

DHS obligated approximately $229 million for data purchases, including products associated with LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters and other providers of identity, address, property, telephone, vehicle and public-record information.

Another $130 million went to tools capable of accessing phone content, including digital forensic products from Cellebrite and Magnet Forensics and technology supporting wiretaps.

Location identification and tracking tools accounted for about $45 million and included services capable of supplying cellphone location intelligence as well as license plate and vehicle information.

The dollar value of location tracking is comparatively small, but the operational value can be substantial.

A location point becomes more useful when an analytical system can associate it with a name, photograph, address history, vehicle, relatives, immigration file and information extracted from another device.

The accounting remains incomplete

The Center describes its $2.9 billion total as a minimum rather than a complete measure of DHS surveillance spending.

Federal contract descriptions are often vague, and agencies sometimes buy products through resellers whose awards do not identify the original manufacturer. The researchers excluded contracts when they could not determine with reasonable confidence what technology or service DHS had purchased.

The analysis also omits stationary systems used exclusively at borders and ports of entry, technology limited to overseas screening, immigrant detention systems and alternatives to detention monitoring.

When a contract supported more than one capability, the Center placed it in one principal category to avoid counting it twice.

The resulting catalog documents expenditures and capabilities. It does not establish that every listed system has been misused, that everyone whose information enters a system is an enforcement target or that every contractor intended its products to support the administration’s deportation campaign.

The report expressly acknowledges those limitations.

DHS policies generally prohibit investigations or enforcement actions based solely on constitutionally protected speech, association or dissent, and department leaders have told Congress that DHS remains committed to protecting constitutional rights.

The Center argues that the word “solely” leaves substantial room for protected activity to become one factor in an investigation, however, and points to reported uses of drones, facial recognition and analytical tools involving protesters, legal observers and people documenting immigration operations.

The larger finding is not the existence of any single surveillance product. It is the scale of the architecture that emerges when cameras, biometric databases, commercial records, device extraction, location tracking and AI-assisted analytics are connected.

The Brennan Center calls on Congress to investigate how DHS acquires and uses the systems and to reassert control over funding.

With new enforcement appropriations still being converted into contracts, the $2.9 billion documented through July may describe the foundation of that architecture more than its eventual size.

Article Topics

biometric identification  |  biometrics  |  border security  |  CBP  |  DHS  |  ICE - U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement  |  law enforcement  |  procurement  |  surveillance