ICE has arrested more than 10,000 migrant gang members since the start of Trump's second term — proof that enforcement works when the government actually tries, even as a surveillance-industrial complex grows fat in the background.
The milestone, announced by DHS Wednesday, includes arrests for murder, assault with a deadly weapon, drug trafficking, racketeering, robbery and extortion. The 10,000th arrest was Javier Hernandez Rosas, an illegal migrant from Mexico and alleged MS-13 member with a cocaine conviction and prior arrests for abduction and weapon possession. Others swept up include Edwin Antonio Hernandez Hernandez, who confessed to five murders in El Salvador — including the live dismemberment of a victim — and Gerson Emir Cuadra Soto, wanted in Honduras for a quadruple homicide. Members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua have also been taken off U.S. streets.
"Many of these gang members were released into our country by Joe Biden," DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said. "These vicious criminals murdered, assaulted, robbed, and terrorized innocent Americans for sport." Mullin credited the Secure America Act, the $70 billion enforcement funding package passed by Congress this month, for turbocharging ICE operations.
Fair question: where was this urgency for the last four years?
But here's what the New York Post doesn't dwell on and The Guardian can't be bothered to contextualize: the machinery behind these arrests is fueling a surveillance apparatus that ought to give every constitutionalist pause. A new report from Mijente, Just Futures Law, and Surveillance Resistance Lab reveals that ICE and CBP contracts with surveillance-tech companies doubled from 2024 to 2025, hitting $310 million — then soared to a record $513 million in 2026. The primary drivers: massive contracts for Palantir, the data analytics firm central to ICE operations, and Anduril, which builds AI-powered surveillance towers, drones, and sensors for the border.
The Guardian framed this entirely as a civil liberties alarm — "we should be worried," one report author said — while burying the fact that the same apparatus is being used to hunt gang members who dismember people. The Post, meanwhile, celebrated the arrests without so much as a glance at the price tag or the permanent surveillance infrastructure being bolted into place.
Both outlets missed the real story: this spending has climbed steadily since 2013 — under Obama, Trump's first term, Biden, and now Trump again. DHS doesn't just buy surveillance products; it operates a billion-dollar incubator that funnels federal money to tech startups through programs like the Silicon Valley Innovation Partnership and the Small Business Innovation Research program, which has poured $845 million into 500 companies since 2004. The Trump administration has used SBIR to fund tools that harvest biometric data from cellphones and deploy AI to catalog passengers' physical characteristics from airport CCTV feeds. The feds are building the companies that build the tools that expand federal power. Follow the money.
ICE is now the best-funded law enforcement agency in the country. Removing gang members from American neighborhoods is a core function of government. But the tools being built to do it — facial recognition, spyware, social media scrapers, autonomous surveillance towers — don't get dismantled when the gang members are gone. Every American should ask what happens when they're turned inward.
