"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.

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.

Beyond mistakes or nonsense, deliberately bad information being injected into AI search summaries is leading people down potentially harmful paths. These days, rather than showing you the traditional list of links when you run a search query, Google is intent on throwing up AI Overviews instead: synthesized summaries of information scraped off the web, with some word-prediction magic added, and packaged together in a way to sound as accurate and reliable as possible. We've written before about some of the problems with these AI Overviews, which regularly contain mistakes or nonsense, and of course rip off the work of the human writers who actually know the answers to the questions you're putting into Google. There's another problem though--these AI answers can actually be dangerous. As with every other new technology through history, scams are now making their way into AI Overviews as well, apparently injecting Google's AI answers with fraudulent phone numbers that you shouldn't trust.

The Mexican city of Guadalupe, which will host portions of the 2026 World Cup, recently showed off four new robot dogs that will help provide security during matches at BBVA Stadium. The K9-X "robodogs" will help officers patrol during the 2026 World Cup this summer. Authorities in Mexico's Guadalupe, Nuevo León, this week unveiled four robot dogs that will be part of the security devices at BBVA Stadium, one of the three Mexican venues of the 2026 World Cup . The robot dogs are not armed, but each unit incorporates video cameras, night vision, and communication systems that are used to issue warnings or instructions. Its function is to deter illegal activity, detect unusual behavior, identify suspicious objects, control crowds, and immediately alert law enforcement when the system deems necessary. Robot dogs operate semi-autonomously: They do not make decisions or execute movements on their own.

ICE and CBP's Face-Recognition App Can't Actually Verify Who People Are ICE has used Mobile Fortify to identify immigrants and citizens alike over 100,000 times, by one estimate. It wasn't built to work like that--and only got approved after DHS abandoned its own privacy rules. The face-recognition app Mobile Fortify, now used by United States immigration agents in towns and cities across the US, is not designed to reliably identify people in the streets and was deployed without the scrutiny that has historically governed the rollout of technologies that impact people's privacy, according to records reviewed by WIRED. The Department of Homeland Security launched Mobile Fortify in the spring of 2025 to "determine or verify" the identities of individuals stopped or detained by DHS officers during federal operations, records show. DHS explicitly linked the rollout to an executive order, signed by President Donald Trump on his first day in office, which called for a "total and efficient" crackdown on undocumented immigrants through the use of expedited removals, expanded detention, and funding pressure on states, among other tactics. Despite DHS repeatedly framing Mobile Fortify as a tool for identifying people through facial recognition, however, the app does not actually "verify" the identities of people stopped by federal immigration agents--a well-known limitation of the technology and a function of how Mobile Fortify is designed and used.

Immigration agents have used Mobile Fortify to scan the faces of countless people in the US--including many citizens. On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security published new details about Mobile Fortify, the face recognition app that federal immigration agents use to identify people in the field, undocumented immigrants and US citizens alike. The details, including the company behind the app, were published as part of DHS's 2025 AI Use Case Inventory, which federal agencies are required to release periodically. The inventory includes two entries for Mobile Fortify--one for Customs and Border Protection (CBP), another for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)--and says the app is in the "deployment" stage for both. CBP says that Mobile Fortify became "operational" at the beginning of May last year, while ICE got access to it on May 20, 2025.

A border patrol agent scans the face of a driver in Minneapolis on 13 January 2026. A border patrol agent scans the face of a driver in Minneapolis on 13 January 2026. Immigration enforcement agents across the US are increasingly relying on a new smartphone app with facial recognition technology. The app is named Mobile Fortify. Simply pointing a phone's camera at their intended target and scanning the person's face allows Mobile Fortify to pull data on an individual from multiple federal and state databases, some of which federal courts have deemed too inaccurate for arrest warrants.