The Tech Tools of ICE

Who is shaping tech policy, tech development and deployment? Who is profiting from its use? And who is monitoring how tech is used?

As I’ve researched for this series, The Tech Tools of ICE, it’s become clear that how tech policy is shaped at the national level is as alarming as the tech tools being utilized. Tech oligarchs are increasingly shaping policy, or stepping into policy voids, which, in turn, shapes how tech tools are utilized to surveil, draw inferences, harass, expel, and control US residents.

It’s important to understand the pathway that enables tech oligarchs to shape policy and develop the tools that abridge our rights. Or, we can flip that sequence – tech oligarchs develop the tools that abridge our rights and then shape policy to promote the deployment of those tools.

It begins with the Homeland Security framework, which, following 9/11, normalized the demonization of immigrants and the invocation of national security to build an apparatus to track immigrants. At the same time, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pushed to offer select venture capitalists unfettered access to the Pentagon. They could both frame the problem and offer solutions.

The ultra-rich were then integrated into electoral and legislative politics with the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision that scrapped corporate campaign limits. Since then, venture capitalists have easily been able to forge relationships with legislators whose victories they bankrolled. Ultimately, what makes or breaks these companies is whether they secure contracts with the US government, and they have pursued these opportunities relentlessly. In particular, venture capitalist (VC) firms, like Palantir, Anthropic and SpaceX, have won access.

But equally important, these venture capitalists have created these opportunities, positioning themselves as visionary leaders of US military policy, and as the innovators and thinkers who will, as Palantir put it, “ensure the future of the west.”

And they have inserted themselves into the infrastructure of the military and Homeland Security; tech company employees have been appointed to key Pentagon positions. For example, The Tech Behind ICE report notes that, in 2025: “the US Army launched Detachment 201, which it dubbed the Executive Innovation Corps, and announced the first intake of Army Reserve Lieutenant Colonels drawn from the tech sector… An Anduril employee was nominated for Army Under Secretary and sworn in on September 22, 2025.” Another example of a venture capitalist shaping policy is former Anduril employee Antoine McCord, who now serves as Chief Intelligence Officer and Chief AI Officer at DHS, with control over the DHS Office of Biometric Management.

These relationships have proved incredibly lucrative, with contracts in the hundreds of millions. Anduril’s government contracts for AI drones, deployed for migrant dragnets, has generated more than $500 million dollars for the company. Lobbying by the biggest tech heavy-hitters has increased fourfold since 2020, topping $47 million in 2025. Companies building surveillance technology have won $6 billion on federal contracts since 2000.

Congressional aides have been the recipients of great largesse. For example, a group called the Innovative Futures Collective, a creation of the political fundraising firm Fulkerson Kennedy & Company, has sent staffers on luxury domestic and international junkets to get acquainted with AI companies.

AI companies have also shaped policy on the administrative side in two key ways. First, civil rights protections have been dismantled through every possible mechanism, such as the decimation of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, among many others. This has been exacerbated by the use of dehumanizing language to target the population more broadly. Trump’s 2025 National Security Memorandum - 7 expanded the FBI and DHS mandate to include targeting people holding views described by the administration as “anti-capitalist” or “un-American” or “anti-Christian” as domestic terrorists. A 2026 memo further expanded DHS’s role in targeting “violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro transgender, and anarchist.” These pronouncements rationalized the administration’s creating even more opportunities for profiteering by AI companies.

The second strategy has been the requirement that companies adhere to the US government’s new “Unbiased AI Principles." The problem is that those principles aren’t defined. And, put together with the anti-DEI regulations, the administration came up with this language in an executive order: “One of the most pervasive and destructive of these ideologies is so-called 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' (DEI)." In the AI context, DEI includes the suppression or distortion of factual information about race or sex; manipulation of racial or sexual representation in model outputs; incorporation of concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism; and discrimination on the basis of race or sex. DEI displaces the commitment to truth in favor of preferred outcomes and, as recent history illustrates, poses an existential threat to reliable AI.

To counter this alleged existential threat, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and two AI venture capital leaders co-authored America’s AI Action Plan. One of his co-authors, David Sacks, one-time chief operating officer of PayPal, with venture capital invested in Palantir and SpaceX, who co-chairs the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, is also a giant in crypto markets. He is directly reaping the financial benefits of the policies he is crafting.

Alarmingly, one of the goals of this Action Plan is to prevent states from implementing stricter guardrails on AI at the state level. Given that DHS, alone, has identified 238 uses of AI at the same time that protections have been gutted, we need to hold fast to our ability to demand accountability at the state level.

In next month’s Retiree Advocate, I’ll close out this series with a look at organizing strategies underway to counter the power of the tech oligarchs and Trump administration.