The Senate Passed $70 Billion for the Next Phase of America's Social Credit System.
Buried in the bill is the infrastructure of a system that has nothing to do with the border and everything to do with you.
Everyone knows China built a social credit system. What almost no one knows is that the United States is building one now. Last night, the Senate passed $70 billion to accelerate it. They called it border security.
I just finished the chapter of the book I’m writing.
The one where I lay out, as plainly as I know how, how I came to understand that the United States is building a social credit score on its own citizens.
I set it down and opened the news. The Senate had passed a $70 billion bill overnight. Immigration enforcement, the headlines said. AI and machine learning for border security.
I know what that means. I spent two decades inside the payments infrastructure that feeds it.
The border has nothing to do with it.
The bill that passed the Senate overnight is called the Immigration Enforcement Funding. That is not what it is.
It is $70 billion passed through reconciliation, a procedural mechanism that bypasses the normal legislative process and requires only a simple majority. No filibuster. No extended debate. No requirement that the public fully understand what is being funded before the vote is called.
Buried inside it is a line item for artificial intelligence and machine learning at Customs and Border Protection. $3.5 billion. The headlines did not mention it. The immigration framing ensured that.
I noticed it because I know what AI and machine learning mean when deployed by an agency whose biometric database already holds more than 325 million identities, including fingerprints, facial images, iris scans, palm prints, and voice prints, including US citizens, processed at 400,000 transactions per day, and currently being upgraded to absorb 500 million. It does not mean faster passport scanning. It means automated identity scoring, including behavioral pattern recognition. Financial surveillance integrated with travel history, phone data, and commercial records purchased from data brokers.
It means the payments infrastructure I spent two decades helping to build is about to get a $3.5 billion upgrade. And the people it is being built to process are not migrants crossing the border.
They are you.
The contractor running that infrastructure is Palantir.
Palantir’s name is familiar. What it has built inside America’s enforcement infrastructure is not.
The company has worked with ICE since 2008. Between 2008 and 2021, ICE awarded Palantir $186.6 million in contracts, making it the agency’s third-largest contractor. That was before the current administration. Since January 2025 alone, Palantir has signed over $81 million in new technology contracts with ICE.
In February 2026, the Department of Homeland Security signed a $1 billion blanket purchase agreement with Palantir covering five years, with no competitive bidding required. CBP, ICE, FEMA, and CISA can place orders directly, on demand. No procurement process. No public review.
Here is what that money buys.
Palantir operates a platform called ImmigrationOS, designed to combine passport data, Social Security records, IRS information, Medicaid records, and license plate reader data into a single operational profile. A separate tool called ELITE, Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement, maps that data onto an interface described by the agents who use it as kind of like Google Maps. When an officer selects a neighborhood, the system displays the density of people it has flagged. When the officer selects an individual, it generates a dossier: a photograph, date of birth, last known address, and an Address Confidence Score between 0 and 100, indicating how certain the algorithm is about where you live.
ICE agents now have access to profiles on 20 million people through this system. Accessible from an iPhone. In the field. In real time.
That data includes your Medicaid records. Not because you crossed a border. Because you used a government health program, and that data is now feeding an enforcement algorithm.
This is not a new capability being built from scratch with reconciliation funding. It is an existing infrastructure being industrialized. Palantir has been here since 2008. What is new is the scale, the AI layer, and the removal of any remaining pretense that this is about the border.
The clearest illustration of what Palantir is and what it is willing to do is a story most people have forgotten.
In 2018, roughly 4,000 Google engineers signed a petition, and at least a dozen resigned in protest over Project Maven, a Pentagon program using AI to analyze drone surveillance footage. The specific fear was not abstract. Engineers understood that they were building a system capable of identifying a human face from a drone feed in real time and handing that identification to a targeting system. The distance between surveillance and strike was a single automated step. That was the line they would not cross. Google walked away from the contract. Palantir picked it up. That contract, worth a few million dollars when Google dropped it, has since grown to a $13 billion program.
Palantir then built the same capability for domestic use and called it immigration enforcement. ELITE does not use drones. It uses a database. But the function is identical. Identify the person. Generate a dossier with a photograph. Assign a confidence score. Hand it to the enforcement agent with a daily arrest quota.
The engineers who refused built nothing. Palantir built a $13 billion targeting infrastructure on the foundation of their refusal, then brought the same logic home.
You may be thinking this does not apply to you. You are a citizen. You have documents. You have nothing to hide.
That is what more than 170 Americans thought before they were detained.
Since January 2025, more than 170 US citizens have been taken into custody by immigration agents. In many cases, agents rejected documentary proof of citizenship because a phone app said otherwise. Birth certificates presented on the street were not enough. The algorithm outranked the document.
The app is called Mobile Fortify. It scans your face in real time and searches it against 200 million images stored across government databases that the ACLU describes as notoriously error-filled. DHS has used Mobile Fortify more than 100,000 times nationwide. It does not ask for your consent. It does not distinguish between citizens and noncitizens at the point of collection. It retains your facial image and fingerprints for 15 years, whether or not you were ever arrested or charged with anything.
In February 2025, DHS quietly rescinded its own facial recognition safeguards, removing what the agency had previously described as the most extensive protections of any federal agency. No announcement. No public comment period. The protections simply disappeared from the agency website.
Agents have used this technology not just during enforcement operations but at protests and neighborhood gatherings. They have filmed journalists. They have scanned the faces of people watching arrests from the sidewalk. Lawyers have described clients who were taken into custody after the app failed to identify them correctly, and agents treated the failure as confirmation of suspicion rather than evidence of error.
This is the system the reconciliation bill funds at scale. Not a pilot program. Not a proposal. A system already running 100,000 scans and expanding, now with $70 billion behind it and zero privacy impact assessments filed this year to document what it is doing or to whom.
The question is not whether this infrastructure could be used against citizens.
The question is what you call it when it already has been.
Now follow the money.
In July 2025, Congress passed the GENIUS Act, and the President signed it into law. The headline was stablecoin regulation. The mechanism was something else.
Under the GENIUS Act, private stablecoin issuers are required by law to maintain procedures to block, freeze, and reject transactions. That is not a future risk. That is the text of the statute. A private issuer operating under US law already has the legal obligation and the technical capability to turn your money off.
This is not theoretical. Tether has already frozen over $4.4 billion in USDT in coordination with US law enforcement, including a record $344 million freeze in April 2026. The freeze switch exists, and it has been pulled.
The same month Congress banned a government-controlled digital dollar for being a surveillance threat, it created a private digital dollar with the same capability built into the law.
I spent two decades inside the payments infrastructure. I know what this architecture is. A payment rail that can be frozen on instruction, conditioned on behavior, and restricted by score is not money in the way Americans have understood money. It is a permission system. You are not spending. You are requesting approval to spend.
Now place that next to what Palantir is already running. A system that collects your identity, your biometrics, your Medicaid records, your financial transactions, your location, and your associations, and generates a score. An invisible score. One you cannot see, cannot contest, and cannot appeal.
The social credit system that everyone was warned China was building does not live in Beijing. It lives in the gap between those two infrastructures. The enforcement layer that scores you. The payment layer that acts on the score. When those two systems are fully connected, your money becomes the enforcement mechanism. Not a fine. Not an arrest. Your money simply stops working. At the grocery store. At the pharmacy. At the gas pump.
No warrant. No court order. No appeal.
That is what I understood watching the coverage of Trump’s trip to Beijing in May. The press was watching a trade negotiation. I was watching two countries compare notes on an architecture they are both building toward the same end.
The Senate just passed $70 billion to fund the next phase of the American version.
The chapter I finished yesterday was not a warning about what might happen.
It was a description of what is already here.
Aware Trade is an independent investigative publication focused on the rise of America’s social credit system: the AI surveillance layer, programmable money, and the data infrastructure being built to score and control citizens at scale. It is written by a payments industry insider with two decades of experience in the infrastructure at the center of this transformation. No ads. No sponsors. No institutional funding. Subscribe to follow the investigation.