Gadget Review reports:

A critical Reddit comment about immigration enforcement can, four months later, bring plainclothes agents to a poster’s door carrying a printout of the post — a scenario no longer hypothetical. According to the Wall Street Journal, ICE has built a funded, contractor-powered surveillance operation that monitors social media around the clock — not just for credible violence, but for speech that challenges the agency’s mission. Since early 2025, DHS has fired off hundreds of administrative subpoenas to unmask anonymous users. The volume is unprecedented, and the targets are often ordinary people.

Here’s what your tax dollars bought:

• ICE spent roughly $258 million on surveillance technology in Trump’s first full year back — a 57% jump over the prior year, per federal budget analyses cited by the Journal.
• Six contracts totaling nearly $50 million fund social-media threat scanning, with most money obligated since early 2025.
• Virginia-based contractor Amivero, primarily a software shop, landed an $8 million deal to monitor platforms. It subcontracted work to Guidehouse, a global defense and intelligence consulting firm.
• ICE’s Privacy Office — the entity nominally overseeing all of this — employs two full-time staffers.

Contractors don’t just flag posts. They build dossiers that read like a true-crime evidence board: name, date of birth, Social Security number, vehicle registration, criminal history. AI-driven “anticipatory threat intelligence” cross-references social media activity with DMV records and police reports. Civil-rights attorneys and former DHS staffers say the dragnet routinely sweeps up ordinary critics whose speech falls squarely within First Amendment protection. [Continue reading…]

CBS News reports:

Detentions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement set a monthly record high for the second Trump administration in July, internal agency data obtained by CBS News shows, as ICE widened its crackdown, making arrests at airports, immigration check-in offices and communities across the U.S.

Last month, ICE took into custody more than 46,000 individuals facing deportation because of alleged immigration violations, like entering the U.S. illegally or overstaying their visas, according to preliminary Department of Homeland Security figures.

The statistics, which have not yet been publicly disclosed by the federal government, show that a summer enforcement surge by ICE continued to intensify in July, as the agency faced pressure from the White House to record 2,000 arrests across the country each day. An average of 1,500 detainees entered ICE custody each day last month, the data indicates, though some of them were first arrested by Customs and Border Protection agents. [Continue reading…]