Trump and Big Tech Are Building a Surveillance State and Getting Rich Doing It.

On June 23, 2026, primary day in New York, Paigelynne Gonyea was working the polls at the Central Library in Syracuse. During a lull she checked her phone and found a voicemail from a man who said he was a Homeland Security special agent. “We were just by your apartment,” he said. He wanted to talk about an Instagram post from January, a photo of the ICE officer who shot Renee Good in Minneapolis, with a caption saying it would be a good day for him to be indicted.

She told him she was at a polling site. So two agents wearing ICE badges walked into the library while her seventy-year-old fellow poll worker filmed them. They had a file, Gonyea told NPR. It contained her name, address, date of birth, height, weight, and eye color, plus a printout of the post. They asked her to sign a form headed “YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW.” A DHS spokesperson later told NPR she had published an officer’s address. This was a lie. The post contained no address.

She didn’t sign the form the agent gave her and went back to work.

This is just a glimpse at what is happening across America. Two immigration agents had been sent from New Jersey to New York over a caption in a social media post. The agents had queried a system, and the system had returned Gonyea’s personal information.

All of this data is now centralized in the federal government thanks to a handful of companies building the most complete apparatus for locating people on American soil that has ever existed.

They claim to have built this machine to track down illegal immigrants. Now it is looking at American citizens.

How the machine was built

In March 2025 the President signed an executive order on “Eliminating Information Silos.” It told agencies to open and consolidate Social Security, IRS, HHS, Labor, and Treasury records that had been kept apart by design for fifty years. DOGE did the work, including an IRS “hackathon” to build a single API into Palantir’s Foundry.

In July 2025, CMS signed an unannounced agreement, later obtained by the AP, giving ICE the names, addresses, birthdates, race, and Social Security numbers of 79 million Medicaid enrollees. Judge Vince Chhabria limited ICE’s use of the data in August 2025. By July 2026, in a suit by twenty Democratic attorneys general, the government had acknowledged that CMS had sent ICE records on millions of people, some of them citizens and lawful residents, beyond what the judge allowed, and that ICE had shared the file with Palantir “via a Microsoft Teams chat.” Asked how it had been purged, the government said it was deleted from the chat. Days later an ICE official found six users who still had copies.

In February 2026, DHS signed a Blanket Purchase Agreement worth up to $1 billion over five years with Palantir for department-wide Gotham and Foundry, used for case management, threat identification, logistics and planning. CBP, ICE, FEMA, and CISA can draw on it without further competition.

CBP’s $363 million contract with Anduril pays for more than 200 Sentry Towers, radar and cameras on 80-foot masts that feed Lattice, which fuses drones, ground sensors, and whatever else is plugged in. ICE bought phone-cracking tools from Cellebrite ($11.1 million in 2025 and $12.8 million in 2026), Paragon ($2 million), and Pen Link ($2.3 million), which read Signal and WhatsApp as typed. CBP bought Fivecast to track “sentiment and emotion” on social media. In September 2025 ICE paid Clearview AI $7.7 million, sole-source, to search against 60 billion scraped faces, by the company’s own count. In July 2026 ICE placed a $125 million sole-source order with Thomson Reuters for license-plate data, later withdrawn for competitive bid, and had local police run Flock Safety searches for it as an “informal” favor.

Palantir’s ImmigrationOS, a $30 million contract awarded in April 2025, and its ELITE app give ICE a map of deportation targets, each with a dossier and an address “confidence score” fed by HHS data, among other sources. ICE uses it to pick neighborhoods to raid. ICE and CBP spending with eleven surveillance vendors doubled from 2024 to 2025, to $310 million, then reached $513 million in the first four months of 2026, by one tally of USAspending data.

Where it has been pointed

DHS sent about 3,000 agents to Minneapolis in December 2025 for Operation Metro Surge. The operation ran until February 12, 2026. ICE made at least 3,789 arrests, three-quarters of them of people with no criminal record, and two citizens were killed.

In January 2026, Attorney General Bondi sent Minnesota a letter asking the state to turn over its Medicaid records, repeal its sanctuary policies, and give the Justice Department its voter rolls. On January 29, Tom Homan tied a drawdown of agents to state “cooperation.” Minnesota refused. The Justice Department has sued 30 states for unredacted rolls with birthdates and partial Social Security numbers, to run through a DHS citizenship check. It has lost most of those cases.

On September 25, 2025, the President signed NSPM-7, which directs Joint Terrorism Task Forces to investigate networks that fund or organize “political violence” and lists “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity” as “common threads.” The memorandum creates no new power. It applies existing terrorism and money-laundering tools to the beliefs it names.

By spring 2026 the FBI had a category for people who object to data centers. WIRED obtained more than 1,000 pages of FBI, DHS, and fusion-center bulletins describing “anti-tech violent extremism,” a category in no public document. Fusion centers monitor town halls and county budget meetings; one lists “photography” near a data center as suspicious. Gallup asked Americans in April 2026 why they opposed data centers. Half said water, power, and land. One percent said government overreach.

On June 11, 2026, the FBI searched the Cleveland office of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a progressive group that runs some of Ohio’s largest voter-registration drives, seized computers, and visited staff at home. Twelve days later, two DHS agents walked into the Central Library in Syracuse.

After Nevada beat the Justice Department in court, its election office received seven FBI subpoenas in three months, confirmed September 4, 2026. In August 2026, 404 Media reported that ICE is seeking a contractor to process voter registration and voting-history data.

Who got rich

Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff who runs the deportation campaign, disclosed $100,001–$250,000 in Palantir stock, held in a child’s account and acquired between the two Trump terms, as POGO reported in June 2025 from disclosure forms. A White House official said he “has and will continue to recuse” from matters affecting the stock. The same month, ICE posted a notice that it would award Palantir its $170.8 million case-management contract without competition: “no vendors other than Palantir capable of performing the necessary work.” Kara Frederick, Miller’s senior adviser, disclosed $50,001–$100,000 in Palantir. At least ten other White House staff held the stock, including the federal CIO, a former Palantir employee. Paul Ingrassia, the DHS White House liaison, held Palantir and was nominated to run the Office of Special Counsel, which protects whistleblowers; the nomination was withdrawn October 21, 2025.

Peter Thiel, Palantir’s chairman, holds about 100 million shares, worth about $18 billion at end-2025 prices. He employed JD Vance, seeded his fund, and spent $15 million to put him in the Senate. Palantir was the best-performing stock in the S&P 500 in 2024, rose 135% in 2025, and passed a $430 billion market cap. Palmer Luckey, Anduril’s founder, made more than $1.4 million in itemized federal contributions in the 2023–24 cycle; in March 2026 the Army consolidated 120 Anduril contracts into one with a $20 billion ceiling. Donald Trump Jr. was made a partner at 1789 Capital a week after the election; the fund invests in Anduril and SpaceX and grew from $200 million to $3.5 billion in about a year. Clearview named Hal Lambert, who founded the MAGA ETF and sat on the inaugural committee, and Richard Schwartz, who advised Giuliani, as co-CEOs in February 2025. ICE’s $7.7 million contract followed in September.

Nothing had to be rebuilt to point it at citizens

Clearview’s ICE contract is written for child-exploitation and officer-assault cases, not immigration. The Medicaid file CMS sent ICE resolves an address; it does not say whether the person at that address is a roofer or a poll worker. Fivecast’s sentiment tool has no immigration setting. Clearview’s 60 billion faces are not sorted by legal status.

For the decades the data existed, the Privacy Act and the career officials who administered it kept these queries from running against citizens. The March 2025 order told agencies to clear away the internal rules that enforced the Act. The June 2026 order took the right of appeal from the officials who run the systems. The people who hold the logins now work at will, and NSPM-7 tells them what to look for.

In Syracuse, after the agents left, Gonyea finished her shift. The county’s Republican elections commissioner called it “a comedy of errors from beginning to end.” She posted the voicemail, the form, and the video.

The file is still in the system. It has her height.

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The ledger

What was built

Who profits

As POGO reported in June 2025, from disclosure forms. Most of the ten staff holdings were $1,001–$15,000.

Where it has been pointed