Florida steered at least $6 million from the state budget to Peregrine Technologies for immigration tracking software at more than two dozen law enforcement agencies, with no public bidding on record.
Florida steered at least $6 million in this year's state budget to one firm, Peregrine Technologies, to supply immigration-tracking software to more than two dozen Florida law enforcement agencies, and the state agency that issued those contracts has not answered questions about whether it ran a competitive bidding process.
The state's 2026 conference offer, published on the Florida Senate's ACJ conference offer PDF, contains line-item language that regional reporting describes as steering that $6 million toward Peregrine. The language sits inside the chamber's Appropriations Conference committee document, where final appropriations are negotiated. A line item that names a single vendor, or narrows the field to one product, sidesteps the public bid notices a normal state procurement would require.
On top of that direct budget allocation, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's State Board of Immigration Enforcement has dispersed additional millions in grants to local agencies conditioned on purchasing Peregrine software, per the SBIE Cabinet Package and the LBC Award and Amendment Review Packet published February 24, 2026. SBIE, a state board housed inside FDLE, was created to coordinate state-level enforcement of federal immigration law and push grant money out to local agencies willing to take it up. Recipients include the Orange County and Osceola County sheriff's offices, listed on FDLE's FY25-26 Immigration Grant Program page.
Once one vendor is named in a budget line item, parallel grants conditioning local funding on the same product make that vendor the standing purchase at every agency that wants the grant money. No bid notice goes out; the procurement-defense explanation writes itself.
The Orlando Sentinel and The News Herald carried AP-anchored reporting linking Peregrine's lobbyists to Governor Ron DeSantis's political network. Separately, the Bradenton Times and public radio station WSLR point to a House budget negotiator whose spouse is connected to the company. It remains unclear whether those ties overlap with the governor's lobbying trail or describe a distinct relationship.
FDLE did not respond to questions about whether it solicited competing bids before issuing SBIE grants, and the agency's published grant materials do not document such a process.
The Peregrine platform's selling point is also what civil-liberties advocates say is its risk. The platform pulls court reports, arrest records, police interview transcripts, body-camera footage, license-plate reader images, and other law enforcement records into a single application for officers in the field.
That data aggregation drew sharp criticism from civil-liberties advocates cited in the AP-anchored reporting. Wilcox called the rollout a "Big Brother" expansion of state surveillance and raised the question of "conflicts of interest" in how the vendor was selected. Levinson-Waldman said any vendor selection of this scale demands robust safeguards and a public explanation of why this company was selected over alternatives.
The stakes fall hardest on people whose encounters with law enforcement are filtered through immigration status or political expression. Civil-liberties advocates flagged the platform's potential use to build dossiers on people exercising First Amendment rights, to support immigration enforcement, and to criminalize reproductive-health seekers. None of those uses are documented in the SBIE Cabinet Package or the grant language; they reflect what the platform's design would allow.
FDLE's published artifacts give the public most of the trail: the line-item authority in the Senate conference PDF, the SBIE Cabinet Package's grant structure, the LBC Award and Amendment Review Packet's vendor detail, and the FY25-26 IGP grant page. What those documents do not document is the procurement decision that put one vendor at the center of the state's immigration-tracking push. How the agency answers that question is the next milestone to watch.