The Department of Homeland Security plans to spend more than $30 million for body-worn cameras after the fatal shooting of two immigrants in the past two weeks renewed scrutiny of the Trump administration’s aggressive enforcement approach.
DHS ordered body cameras from Axon Enterprise in two separate awards Friday, one for $17.8 million and another totaling $13.1 million. In June, the department also agreed to spend $75,613 on body cameras for investigations from Axon. Prior to that, DHS spent $5.1 million on body cameras from Axon in March 2025.
DHS said the immigration agents were not wearing body cameras during the shootings in Houston and Biddeford, Maine. In the aftermath of the killings, DHS said agents who didn’t have cameras would receive them in the next 60 days.
“[Immigration and Customs Enforcement] will ensure each arrest team has an individual wearing a body camera,” a DHS spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday about the awards. “Ensuring all of our ICE law enforcement officers have body cameras nationwide is a top priority for DHS.”
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DHS didn’t say how many body cameras it planned to purchase.
Lawmakers continue to clash over requiring ICE agents to wear body cameras, following the shootings of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston on July 7 and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero on July 13.
In February, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said all DHS law enforcement would get body cameras as funding allowed after the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minnesota in January.
The Trump administration and Republican lawmakers have blamed Democrats for the lack of body cameras, saying the department couldn’t purchase the cameras during the two government shutdowns, the latest of which ended in April. The reconciliation bill that ended the DHS shutdown included $20 million for body cameras.
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday rejected a Democratic amendment to require the use of body cameras in their immigration enforcement bill, with Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) saying they were already funded.
“My colleagues on the other side of the aisle stonewalled for about half of this year our ability to easily fund ICE and Border Patrol,” Roy said.
Democrats in the committee responded that DHS had received billions in funding in 2025.
“The second piece of the revisionist history is the idea that the incredibly overfunded, well-funded … DHS hasn’t been able to get body cams in place because Democrats blocked them?” said Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Pennsylvania). “That’s just bullshit.”
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin ordered ICE to temporarily halt traffic stops last week before President Donald Trump quickly stepped in to reverse the decision.
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