U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is in the process of adding 10,000 more deportation officers to its workforce and now plans to supplement those men and women with robot dogs during interior immigration enforcement operations.
A federal procurement notice published by ICE late last week revealed the agency will drop up to $2 million to purchase the four-legged K-9 units, known as “Spot,” from Boston Dynamics. The contract was first reported by ABC News.
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The dogs are intended to enter possibly dangerous or suspicious locations instead of an ICE officer. The company described its Spot “dogs” as a way to “keep people out of harm’s way and aid first responders in assessing dangerous situations.” The company touted that its robot dogs are used by the Secret Service.
The idea of robot dogs made its debut at a border security expo in El Paso, Texas, in 2022. Competing company Ghost Robotics showed the robots at the expo as a way for the Border Patrol to expand surveillance between ports of entry along the Canada and Mexico borders.
A Ghost Robotics representative said the Department of Homeland Security began testing the robots under a pilot program in 2021 and had purchased an undisclosed amount.
ICE’s purchase of an unspecified number of Boston Dynamics robots is funded by a small portion of the $75 billion that Congress gave ICE in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed in July 2025. Of that figure, $30 billion was intended to boost and train employees, expand detainee transportation, and improve information technology.
Earlier this summer, the DHS moved forward with a plan to spend nearly $17 million on Generated Low-Output Voltage Emitters, known as GLOVEs. ICE officers would receive gloves capable of delivering an electric shock when placed against the bare skin of an individual.
The gloves are meant to give federal immigration officers a nonlethal way to deal with violent agitators and illegal immigrants who interfere with law enforcement operations following four fatal shootings during such encounters since January.
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White House border czar Tom Homan described the gloves in an interview on Fox News this month as another way to “help someone get compliant when they are not.”
“You can’t just go from 0 to 100, right, and the first thing you go for is lethal force,” Homan told Fox News.
