Comments and other data left on a PDF detailing Homeland Security's proposal to build "mega" detention and processing centers reveal the personnel involved in its creation. A PDF that Department of Homeland Security officials provided to New Hampshire governor Kelly Ayotte's office about a new effort to build "mega" detention and processing centers across the United States contains embedded comments and metadata identifying the people who worked on it. The seemingly accidental exposure of the identities of DHS personnel who crafted Immigration and Customs Enforcement's mega detention center plan lands amid widespread public pushback against the expansion of ICE detention centers and the department's brutal immigration enforcement tactics. Metadata in the document, which concerns ICE's "Detention Reengineering Initiative" (DRI), lists as its author Jonathan Florentino, the director of ICE's Newark, New Jersey, Field Office of Enforcement and Removal Operations. In a note embedded on top of an FAQ question, "What is the average length of stay for the aliens?"

Documents say customs officers in the US Virgin Islands had friendly relationships with Epstein years after his 2008 conviction, showing how the infamous sex offender tried to cultivate allies. United States prosecutors and federal law enforcement spent over a year examining ties between Jeffrey Epstein and Customs and Border Protection officers stationed in the US Virgin Islands (USVI), according to documents recently released by the Department of Justice. As The Guardian and New York Times have reported, emails, text messages, and investigative records show that Epstein cultivated friendships with several officers, entertaining them on his island and offering to take them for whale-watching trips in his helicopter. He even brought one cannolis for Christmas Eve. In turn, Epstein would bring certain officers his complaints about his treatment at the hands of other CBP and federal agents.

"If you are interested in helping shape and deliver the next chapter of Palantir's work across DHS, please reach out," a Palantir executive wrote to employees about the massive purchasing agreement. The Department of Homeland Security struck a $1 billion purchasing agreement with Palantir last week, further reinforcing the software company's role in the federal agency that oversees the nation's immigration enforcement . According to contracting documents published last week, the blanket purchase agreement (BPA) awarded "is to provide Palantir commercial software licenses, maintenance, and implementation services department wide." The agreement simplifies how DHS buys software from Palantir, allowing DHS agencies like Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to essentially skip the competitive bidding process for new purchases of up to $1 billion in products and services from the company. Palantir did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

From threat modeling to encrypted collaboration apps, we've collected experts' tips and tools for safely and effectively building a group--even while being targeted and tracked by the powerful. Rarely in modern US history have so many Americans opposed the actions of the federal government with so little hope for a top-down political solution. That's left millions of people seeking a bottom-up approach to resistance: grassroots organizing. Yet as Americans assemble their own movements to protect and support immigrants, push back against the Department of Homeland Security's dangerous incursions into cities, and protest for civil rights and policy changes, they face a federal government that possesses vast surveillance powers and sweeping cooperation from the Silicon Valley companies that hold Americans' data. That means political, social, and economic organizing presents a risky dilemma. How do you bring people of all ages, backgrounds, and technical abilities into a mass movement without exposing them to monitoring and targeting by a government--and in particular Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, agencies with paramilitary ambitions, a tendency to break the law, and more funding than some countries' militaries. Organizing safely in an age of surveillance increasingly requires not only technical security know-how, but also a tricky balance between secrecy and openness, says Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on digital civil liberties.

WIRED spoke with the Zoomer founders of a platform where AI agents hire humans to do real-world tasks. Their pitch: People would love to have a clanker as their boss. For centuries, people have catastrophized about robots taking away jobs. On February 1, the paradigm shifted: bots are jobs. Now, 518,284 humans--and rapidly counting--are offering their labor to AI agents on a new online marketplace called RentAHuman . There are classifieds to count pigeons in Washington ($30/hour); deliver CBD gummies ($75/hour); play exhibition badminton ($100/hour); and anything else you could possibly imagine that a disembodied agent couldn't do.

Forum members discuss their discomfort with mass deportation efforts, debate how federal agents have interacted with civilians, and complain about their working conditions. Every day, people log in to an online forum for current and former Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) officers to share their thoughts on the news of the day and complain about their colleagues in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). "ERO is too busy dressing up as Black Ops Commandos with Tactical body armor, drop down thigh rigs, balaclavas, multiple M4 magazines, and Punisher patches, to do an Admin arrest of a non criminal, non-violent EWI that weighs 90 pounds and is 5 foot 2, inside a secure Federal building where everyone has been screened for weapons," wrote one user in July 2025. The forum describes itself as a space for current and prospective HSI agents, "designed for the seasoned HSI Special Agent as well as applicants for entry level Special Agent positions." HSI is the division within ICE whose agents are normally responsible for investigating crimes like drug smuggling, terrorism, and human trafficking.

ICE agents are using a facial recognition app called Mobile Fortify to find people's immigration status. Al Jazeera's Linh Nguyen explains how this tool has effectively turned the US into a checkpoint society. X to block Grok AI's undressing feature

Foreign workers in Japan became one of the main topics of all parties in the Feb. 8 Lower House election, which took place just after a Jan. 23 Cabinet decision calling for 1,231,900 foreign workers by March 2029 in 19 sectors facing acute labor shortages. While some parties argued for strictly monitoring foreign nationals or setting quotas on their numbers, especially at the local level, an artificial-intelligence engineer-led party that went into the election with no seats and emerged with 11 proportional representation seats proposed the increased use of AI to replace workers, including foreign nationals, as a solution to concerns about more foreign workers. Team Mirai, founded in May and led by Takahiro Anno, won four seats in the Tokyo block and three in the South Kanto block, along with one seat each in the Tohoku, North Kanto, Tokai, and Kyushu blocks. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right. With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories.

In hacker spaces and at their homes, creative protesters are laser-cutting and 3D-printing tools to resist an occupation. As the US government's immigration crackdown expands across the country, anxious residents have mobilized to look out for each other. One way they're doing that is by finding ways to build the tools they need to be resilient against the surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents empowered to kill with impunity . All over the country, makers are 3D-printing thousands of whistles to help people on the ground alert others to nearby ICE activity. But the whistles are far from the only tools being used to respond to the surge of federal agents.