Congress Just Locked In $70 Billion for Immigration and Surveillance

Our Take

Credit where it's due: Verified Privacy VPN did the unglamorous work of actually reading what's in a reconciliation bill that most outlets covered as a headline number. The breakdown they found — roughly $26 billion to CBP and $38 billion to ICE, including money explicitly earmarked for "partnerships with state and local police" — is the part that should worry anyone who's been tracking ALPR expansion. That phrase, "partnerships with state and local police," is exactly the mechanism Flock Safety has built its business model around. Local PDs install the cameras, ICE and CBP request the logs, and because it's a "partnership" rather than a federal camera, none of the usual federal procurement transparency or civil-rights review applies.

The video's other key point — that this money moved through reconciliation and skipped the guardrails that normally ride along with annual appropriations — matters more than the dollar figure itself. No detention oversight requirements, no public transparency mandates, no civil rights backstops. That's not an accident of process; it's the point. When surveillance infrastructure gets funded this way, it grows faster than the public's ability to even find out it exists, let alone challenge it. Flock's own transparency portal already shows how often local agencies quietly flip on "national lookup" sharing without a public vote.

This is why mapping the hardware matters as much as mapping the money. A $38 billion ICE budget line is abstract; a camera on your street corner feeding a nationwide network is not. Check our camera map to see what's already deployed near you, and if your city council hasn't had a public vote on ALPR data-sharing agreements, our take-action page has what you need to force that conversation before the next budget cycle locks it in further.