The Real Courtney Brown (@courtneybrown.bsky.social)

ICE Just Dropped $28.7B on Surveillance Tech and Nobody Voted on It New federal spending documents hit public view and immediately raised eyebrows. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is sitting on a $28.7 billion budget tied to surveillance technology alone. Not facilities. Not staffing. Tech. And the scope of what that money unlocks is why privacy advocates are sounding alarms right now. According to WebPro, this funding allows ICE to expand access to high powered tracking tools that include facial recognition systems, large scale data analytics, social media monitoring platforms, and location tracking sourced through commercial databases. These are not future concepts or pilot programs. The infrastructure is already in motion and growing fast. What’s catching attention is how these tools operate in practice. Instead of traditional investigations that rely on warrants and court oversight, much of this surveillance pulls from data already collected by private companies. Phone location trails, online activity, and digital identifiers can be accessed through licensed platforms rather than judges’ signatures. That gray zone is where civil liberties groups say the real problem lives. Officials frame the spending as necessary modernization. But the concern isn’t about technology existing. It’s about scale, access, and accountability. A surveillance budget this large shifts enforcement from targeted actions into continuous monitoring. When systems can scan faces in crowds, track movement patterns, and scrape online behavior around the clock, the net gets wide fast. Another layer that worries advocates is how little public conversation happened before this expansion. There was no major congressional debate, no national rollout announcement, no clear explanation of guardrails. Instead the details surfaced through budget disclosures, leaving communities to piece together what this level of surveillance could mean in daily life. While ICE maintains these tools are focused on immigration enforcement, digital rights experts warn that data ecosystems do not respect neat boundaries. Once surveillance infrastructure exists, it can touch citizens, residents, activists, journalists, and anyone connected to a smartphone or social platform. That’s why today’s report has people asking hard questions about oversight, limits, and whether constitutional protections are keeping pace with modern policing tech. https://balleralert.com/profiles/blogs/ice-28-7-billion-surveillance/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=bluesky