Federal payments to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's surveillance contractors roughly doubled in two years, anchored by Palantir's data platform and Anduril's border hardware, according to USAspending.gov data compiled by advocacy groups.
Federal contract payments to surveillance vendors working for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) climbed from under $50m in 2013 to roughly $310m in fiscal 2025, then hit a record $513m in fiscal 2026 through June, according to USAspending.gov data compiled by the immigrant-rights group Mijente and the legal-advocacy nonprofit Just Futures Law. The 2026 figure is partial-year. If the current pace holds through September, the full-year total would push past $700m.
That trajectory is not just a procurement line. It is the construction budget for a durable, integrated surveillance stack assembled from 11 named vendors, with most of the post-2023 acceleration concentrated in two firms: Palantir, the data-analytics company, and Anduril Industries, the defense-tech company that builds AI-assisted border towers, autonomous drones, and sensor packages.
The new analysis, reported by The Guardian, is the work of Mijente, Just Futures Law, and the Surveillance Resistance Lab. Their taxonomy of 'surveillance tech' is an advocacy framing, a judgment about which federal contracts to include. The spending totals are pulled from USAspending.gov, the public federal spending database, and are independently auditable. The distinction matters: the dollar figures are facts, while the report's interpretation of what counts as a 'surveillance vendor' is the coalition's call.
Palantir and Anduril make the structural shift legible. Palantir has been reportedly awarded roughly $30m to build 'ImmigrationOS', a unified platform intended to consolidate ICE's case-management, targeting, and field-operations data into a single system. Separately, ICE signalled in 2026 that it intends to award Palantir a sole-source contract for an Identity-Integrated Case Management (ICM) system. A sole-source award means no competing vendor is invited to bid. If finalized, it would lock the agency's case-management layer to a single prime contractor for years.
Anduril's role is the physical layer. The company's autonomous surveillance towers, drones, and ground sensors have become the visible infrastructure along the US southern border and increasingly inland, with Anduril's contract volume from ICE and CBP rising in step with the broader spending surge. Together, Palantir handles who ICE is looking at, and Anduril handles what ICE is looking with.
The remaining nine vendors in the cohort fill narrower but reinforcing roles. Peraton handles federal systems integration. Thomson Reuters, RELX, and LexisNexis supply commercial data and records. The rest of the cohort, including Cellebrite, MSAB Group, Pen-Link, Clearview AI, and BI2 Technologies, fills out categories from mobile-device forensics to face search and biometric identification. Each contract on its own reads like a line item. Together, they describe an assembled machine: identify the person, locate the person, surveil the person, detain the person.
Two things are worth watching. First, the final shape of the Palantir ImmigrationOS platform, and whether the sole-source ICM award proceeds; a HigherGov listing of Palantir's ICE contract vehicles shows the company is already on multiple prime contract paths. Second, the full fiscal-year 2026 total, which USAspending.gov will record in October. If the first nine months are any guide, the run rate will set a new ceiling for ICE's annual surveillance-contractor spend.