"There is, in other words, a record-breaking store of federal funds dedicated to policing, detaining, and deporting people who live in this country. As has widely been pointed out, this bill makes ICE the single largest federal law enforcement agency in the country by a significant margin. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council notes that ICE now has “more money per year at its disposal over the next four years than the budgets of the FBI, DEA, ATF, US Marshals, and Bureau of Prisons combined.”
And here is one thing that you can bet with 100% certitude that those agencies will do with that money: Purchase high-tech “AI-powered” systems for surveilling, monitoring, and tracking the nation’s population, in the name of ferreting out non-citizens.
The betting part is cheating a little bit, because ICE and CBP et al already have large contracts with tech companies like Palantir, Anduril, and Cellebrite to do exactly that. But this budget bill has opened the floodgates in a way that the tech companies willing to operate in this space have only dreamed of. With tens of billions of dollars to spend by 2029, when much of the funding is to be cut off—and the Trump administration closer than ever to Silicon Valley—I think we can expect to see a good deal of it invested in AI and surveillance systems whose manufacturers promise to expedite and accelerate Trump’s deportation program.
In fact, that’s already what’s happening."
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-budget-bill-opens-the-floodgates