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# How a noisy Pentagon pack mule became ICE's newest tactical tool
- URL: https://www.amphibian.media/ice-boston-dynamics-robot-dogs-pentagon/
- Published: 2026-10-01T11:20:05.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T11:26:04.000Z
- Description: The immigration enforcement agency paid $1.3 million for four customized Boston Dynamics machines. Taxpayers started paying for their ancestors in the 1960s.
- Author: Matt Stroud
- Tags: DEAD

**On Sept. 25, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement** signed a $1,304,296 purchase order for four robot dogs. The seller was RADeCO Inc., a Connecticut company that sells a customized version of Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot called Cerberus. The order, [first reported by Project Salt Box](https://www.projectsaltbox.com/p/ice-buys-13-million-in-robot-dogs?ref=amphibian.media), covers the robots, four robotic arms, four thermal zoom cameras, radio kits, and training for officers. With training and shipping, each robot costs about $326,000.

ICE did not seek competing bids. On Aug. 27, the Department of Homeland Security posted a [procurement forecast](https://apfs-cloud.dhs.gov/record/75113/public-print/?ref=amphibian.media) with the bland federal title “Boston Dynamics SPOT Robots Procurement.” It estimated the purchase at $1 million to $2 million, marked the competition field “NO,” and listed the place of performance as Fort Benning, Georgia. Two companies answered an ICE notice seeking vendors. ICE rejected one of them, GovTRobotics, because its standard Spot did not meet the agency’s specifications and the company was not an authorized Boston Dynamics reseller, according to a sole-source justification ICE [posted to SAM.gov](https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/d302c9fa6d234522ad2e0a63c8638177/view?ref=amphibian.media).

The forecast names the buyer as ICE’s Office of Firearms and Tactical Programs, which is based at Fort Benning. ICE’s courses there include sniper training, “method of entry training” and drone training, according to [the Atlanta Press Collective](https://atlpresscollective.com/2026/02/07/ice-ramps-up-spending-for-weapons-and-training-center-in-columbus/?ref=amphibian.media), which reviewed the agency’s contracts. ICE spent $160 million on weapons and training in 2025, much of it at the Georgia base.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/db/85/db856f20-fd33-4501-8607-31bc8ddba71a/content/images/2026/09/IMG_6479-scaled.jpg)

RADeCO markets the Cerberus for detecting chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear hazards. ICE's justification for its purchase describes the company's detection software as optional and does not list it among the items bought. (RADeCO Inc.)

The justification document says the robot dogs will support ICE’s Special Response Teams, including in dark settings where officers use night vision equipment. Spot’s microphone can pick up movement, allowing its operator to alert the team “to the presence of a subject.” The arm reaches 5½ feet, far enough to see over closets, bunk beds, and some crawl spaces. The system includes two-way communication for what the document calls de-escalation. The document ties the purchase to the Subterranean Border Defense Act, a law aimed at cross-border smuggling tunnels, and to President Donald Trump’s executive order “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.”

Boston Dynamics has pushed back on the idea that the robots will help ICE deport people. 

“Any suggestion that these robots will be used to support immigrant detentions or deportations is false,” a company spokesperson told [Scripps News](https://www.scrippsnews.com/investigations/ice-inc/new-records-detail-ices-plan-for-four-legged-robots-named-spot?ref=amphibian.media). 

The company has also said that “any attempted weaponization of Boston Dynamics’ robots is strictly prohibited,” [according to The Boston Globe](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/29/business/boston-dynamics-robot-dog-ice/?ref=amphibian.media).

By ICE standards, the robots are a small line item. The same week the forecast appeared, the Associated Press [reported](https://apnews.com/article/ice-electric-shock-gloves-immigration-680c6f8a96736f46529287178c57b44b?ref=amphibian.media) that ICE had awarded a $16.7 million no-bid contract for 6,000 pairs of gloves that deliver electric shocks. A manual for the gloves [obtained by 404 Media](https://www.404media.co/heres-the-manual-for-ices-electric-shock-gloves/?ref=amphibian.media) says they may contribute to “sudden death.”

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/db/85/db856f20-fd33-4501-8607-31bc8ddba71a/content/images/2026/09/GEtruck-ad-p1-x640.jpg)

A 1969 General Electric magazine advertisement touts the company's walking machine, which GE was developing for the U.S. Army. (Image via [cyberneticzoo.com](https://cyberneticzoo.com/walking-machines/1969-ge-walking-truck-ralph-mosher-american/?ref=amphibian.media))

**Spot comes out of a government-backed effort** to teach machines to walk that stretches back to the 1960s. The Army paid for it. So did the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, city police budgets and, in Honolulu, federal pandemic relief. DARPA’s contracts for two Boston Dynamics robots, BigDog and LS3, totaled more than $50 million. Over six decades, the government wanted a walking truck, then a robotic pack mule for infantry squads. Police wanted a machine that could enter a dangerous room before an officer did. Now ICE has one.

In the late 1960s, General Electric engineer Ralph Mosher built the Cybernetic Anthropomorphous Machine, better known as the [Walking Truck](https://cyberneticzoo.com/walking-machines/1969-ge-walking-truck-ralph-mosher-american/?ref=amphibian.media), with Army money. The contraption weighed about 3,000 pounds and stood on four articulated hydraulic legs. An operator sat in the middle and worked hand and foot controls connected to the hydraulics. Mosher, its chief designer and main driver, said operators could run it only a limited time before it wore out. The machine walked because a person inside it was, in effect, walking very hard.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/db/85/db856f20-fd33-4501-8607-31bc8ddba71a/content/images/2026/09/GETruck-ArtistsConcept-x640.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/db/85/db856f20-fd33-4501-8607-31bc8ddba71a/content/images/2026/09/meccano-walking-truck-hugh-henry-1-x640.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/db/85/db856f20-fd33-4501-8607-31bc8ddba71a/content/images/2026/09/ge-quadruped-concept-model_0001-x640.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/db/85/db856f20-fd33-4501-8607-31bc8ddba71a/content/images/2026/09/ge-quadruped-y1-x640.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/db/85/db856f20-fd33-4501-8607-31bc8ddba71a/content/images/2026/09/getruckPSMar1969p77a-x640.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/db/85/db856f20-fd33-4501-8607-31bc8ddba71a/content/images/2026/09/GEWalkTruckTodd86p1-x640.jpg)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/db/85/db856f20-fd33-4501-8607-31bc8ddba71a/content/images/2026/09/quadruped-RobotPMOct65-x640.jpg)

General Electric's Walking Truck, as documented by [cyberneticzoo.com](https://cyberneticzoo.com/walking-machines/1969-ge-walking-truck-ralph-mosher-american/?ref=amphibian.media), a site devoted to the history of early robots. Its page on the machine has more photos, GE's advertising and Popular Science's March 1969 coverage, and it's worth the trip. (Images via [cyberneticzoo.com](https://cyberneticzoo.com/walking-machines/1969-ge-walking-truck-ralph-mosher-american/?ref=amphibian.media))

At the University of Southern California, Andrew Frank and Robert McGhee tried something else. Their [Phony Pony](https://cyberneticzoo.com/walking-machines/1968-phony-pony-frank-mcghee-american/?ref=amphibian.media), built for Frank’s 1968 doctoral dissertation, used digital logic circuits to sequence its legs. It was an early step toward computer-controlled walking, although the machine stayed statically stable, keeping enough feet planted to avoid falling over, and moved very slowly. It walked like a nervous waiter carrying a tray.

Marc Raibert changed the problem. Beginning at Carnegie Mellon University in 1980, and later at MIT, his Leg Laboratory focused on dynamic balance. Animals do not remain perfectly stable while running; they fall, catch themselves, and correct continuously. Raibert’s machines did the same. His single-legged hoppers bounced around the lab while software adjusted height, speed, and body position. The work supplied much of the conceptual foundation for modern legged robots.

Raibert eventually became one of robotics’ most exuberant evangelists. 

> “I happen to believe that robotics will be bigger than the Internet,” [he said](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/13/boston-dynamics-ceo-robotics-will-be-bigger-than-the-internet.html?ref=amphibian.media) at an investment conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 2017\. “The Internet lets every person reach out and touch all the information in the world. But robotics lets you reach out and touch and manipulate all the stuff in the world.”

That ambition found a willing patron in [DARPA](https://www.darpa.mil/about?ref=amphibian.media). The agency exists because the Soviet Union launched Sputnik first. The Pentagon created the Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1958, after the satellite convinced American officials that an adversary could surprise the United States with technology. The agency later acquired the D in its name, lost it briefly and got it back. It pays for research too speculative, too expensive, or too far from a market for ordinary procurement, and its fingerprints are on early computer networking, stealth aircraft and miniaturized GPS receivers. Its bets fail regularly. That's part of the arrangement. A failed prototype can still leave behind an idea, a component, or a group of engineers who know something they didn't know before.

In 1992, Raibert and colleagues spun Boston Dynamics out of MIT. The company spent years on engineering work and simulation software before it became famous for machines that seemed uncannily alive. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Pentagon interest in unmanned systems accelerated, and Boston Dynamics became one of DARPA’s most visible robotics contractors.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/db/85/db856f20-fd33-4501-8607-31bc8ddba71a/content/images/2026/10/1-leggedsquads--1-.jpg)

The Legged Squad Support System, or LS3, a robot Boston Dynamics developed for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, walks past trees carrying two military packs in a photo DARPA released in December 2012\. The Marine Corps shelved the project in 2015, in part because the gas-powered robot was too loud for combat. (DARPA via [phys.org](https://phys.org/news/2012-12-legged-squad-ls3-darpa-four-legged.html?ref=amphibian.media))

BigDog arrived in the mid-2000s. An internal-combustion engine drove its hydraulics, and it was designed to carry heavy loads over terrain that defeated wheels. In 2007, DARPA awarded Boston Dynamics a $10 million contract to keep developing it, with options that could have raised the total to $40 million, [according to Defense Industry Daily](https://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/darpas-robot-dog-project-03457/?ref=amphibian.media). Videos of the machine slipping on ice, scrambling to recover after being kicked, and picking through rubble became internet staples. Watching BigDog could produce the sensation that someone had removed the skin from a large animal and found an engine underneath.

In February 2010, Boston Dynamics [announced](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cga/humanoids-ugrad-10/bdi.pdf?ref=amphibian.media) a $32 million DARPA contract for the Legged Squad Support System, or LS3\. The goal was a robotic mule that could carry 400 pounds, follow troops across rough ground, and cover 20 miles on one load of fuel. Raibert said at the time that taking 50 pounds off each soldier’s back would reduce injuries and fatigue.

The Marines tested LS3 during the Rim of the Pacific exercise in Hawaii in the summer of 2014\. It hauled gear and followed commands across bad terrain. It also sounded like lawn equipment pursuing a squad through the woods.

> “They took it as it was: a loud robot that’s going to give away their position,” Kyle Olson, a spokesman for the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, [told Military.com](https://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/12/22/marine-corps-shelves-futuristic-robo-mule-due-to-noise-concerns.html?ref=amphibian.media) in December 2015\. 

Nobody had worked out how Marines would repair a massive hydraulic robot on patrol, either. A second contract worth almost $10 million followed the first, and then the Marine Corps shelved the project.

The money had already produced something else. Boston Dynamics used remaining contract funds to build a smaller, electrically powered robot it called Spot, and Marines tested it at Quantico, Virginia, in September 2015, Military.com reported. That Spot could carry about 40 pounds and lacked LS3’s autonomy. The machine lost the giant backpack and gained a better reason to walk into buildings.

DARPA had described its legged-robot work in those terms years earlier. “What we gain through Cheetah and related research efforts are technological building blocks that create possibilities for a whole range of robots suited to future Department of Defense missions,” program manager Gill Pratt said [in 2012](https://www.army-technology.com/features/featuredarpas-cheetah-bolts-to-faster-speeds-than-usain/?ref=amphibian.media), describing a sprinting quadruped Boston Dynamics built under another DARPA program.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/db/85/db856f20-fd33-4501-8607-31bc8ddba71a/content/images/2026/10/AJNHWMQIKRAJFMY6HRNAXOL4JE-1.jpeg)

The original Spot, a prototype that Boston Dynamics built with money left over from its LS3 contract, stands outside a building as Marines enter during a demonstration at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, on Sept. 16, 2015\. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency employees trained Marines from the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab to operate the robot. (U.S. Marine Corps, [via Military Times](https://www.militarytimes.com/2017/07/20/marines-test-darpas-four-legged-robot/?ref=amphibian.media))

Corporate owners came and went while the machines developed. Google bought Boston Dynamics in 2013 as part of a robotics push led by Android co-founder Andy Rubin. It was an awkward pairing. Boston Dynamics liked long-horizon engineering. Google wanted robots that people could buy. The company’s viral videos created a problem familiar to anyone who has watched an engineer kick a headless metal quadruped: People had feelings about this.

> “There’s excitement from the tech press, but we’re also starting to see some negative threads about it being terrifying, ready to take humans’ jobs,” Courtney Hohne, then communications director at Google X, wrote in a March 2016 email [first reported by Bloomberg](https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/17/google-could-be-selling-boston-dynamics-because-even-google-thinks-these-robots-are-terrifying/?ref=amphibian.media).

Alphabet put Boston Dynamics up for sale. SoftBank bought it in 2017, and Hyundai Motor Group later acquired control. Along the way, the company turned Spot into a commercial product with a list price of about $75,000.

The New York Police Department leased a Spot that it called “Digidog” in late 2020 for $94,000\. It sent the robot to a home invasion in the Bronx in February 2021 and to a public housing building in Manhattan that April. The backlash had little to do with whether the robot’s gait-control algorithms were elegant. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called it a “robotic surveillance ground drone.” A spokesperson for Mayor Bill de Blasio said it was “creepy, alienating, and sends the wrong message to New Yorkers.” The department ended the lease in April, months early, [NPR reported](https://www.npr.org/2021/04/30/992551579/creepy-robot-dog-loses-job-with-new-york-police-department?ref=amphibian.media).

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/db/85/db856f20-fd33-4501-8607-31bc8ddba71a/content/images/2026/10/digidog___11125011235.jpeg)

Mayor Eric Adams, right, and New York Police Department officials announce the return of Digidog, a Boston Dynamics Spot robot, at a news conference in Times Square on April 11, 2023\. The city bought two of the robots outright with forfeiture money, at $75,000 each, Patch reported. (NYC Mayor's Office, [via Patch](https://patch.com/new-york/new-york-city/nypd-unleashes-dystopian-robot-police-dog-again-advocates-howl?ref=amphibian.media))

Two years later, Mayor Eric Adams brought Digidog back. “Digidog is out of the pound,” Adams [said](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/robotic-police-dog-digidog-rejoins-nypd?ref=amphibian.media) at an April 2023 news conference. “A few loud people were opposed to it, and we took a step back. That is not how I operate.”

> “The NYPD is turning bad science fiction into terrible policing,” Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, [said in response](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/robocop-no-robodog-robotic-dog-rejoins-new-york-police-rcna79306?ref=amphibian.media). “New York deserves real safety, not a knockoff RoboCop.”

Honolulu found a stranger funding stream. In January 2021, Honolulu Civil Beat [reported](https://www.civilbeat.org/2021/01/honolulu-police-spent-150000-in-cares-funds-on-a-robot-dog/?ref=amphibian.media) that the city’s police department had spent $150,045 in federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act money on a Spot, officially to take temperatures at a tent city for homeless people during the pandemic. An anonymous Honolulu officer offered a less bureaucratic explanation of the department’s spending: “Toys, toys, toys. Everything we could buy we would buy.”

The federal government came back as a customer, too. In 2022, DHS’ Science and Technology Directorate announced it was testing robot dogs made by Philadelphia-based Ghost Robotics for patrols along the southern border. “The southern border can be an inhospitable place for man and beast, and that is exactly why a machine may excel there,” Brenda Long, a program manager in the directorate, [said](https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/02/homeland-security-eyes-robot-dogs-to-patrol-the-southern-border/?ref=amphibian.media).

Ghost preferred the term “quadrupedal unmanned ground vehicle” and built its machines for military and security customers. It also took a more permissive view of what those customers might mount on them. In October 2021, a Ghost Vision 60 appeared at an Army trade show carrying the Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle, a weapon [made by SWORD Defense Systems](https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/21/guns-on-robots?ref=amphibian.media). Then-CEO Jiren Parikh told [IEEE Spectrum](https://spectrum.ieee.org/ghost-robotics-armed-military-robots?ref=amphibian.media) that some government customers do work his company is not privy to. “We sell them our robot, and they can use it with any software, any radio, and any payload,” he said. He suggested the legs, not the rifle, drew the attention: “If our robot had tracks on it instead of legs, nobody would be paying attention.”

A year later, Boston Dynamics, along with five other robotics companies, published an [open letter](https://www.axios.com/2022/10/06/boston-dynamics-pledges-weaponize-robots?ref=amphibian.media) pledging not to weaponize their general-purpose robots or help customers do so. “Weaponized applications of these newly-capable robots will also harm public trust in the technology,” they wrote. The pledge carried a caveat: “To be clear, we are not taking issue with existing technologies that nations and their government agencies use to defend themselves and uphold their laws.”

No pledge covers every company with a quadruped to sell. In 2024, an Ohio company called Throwflame began selling the Thermonator, a Unitree robot dog with a flamethrower on its back, for $9,420\. The company advertised a 30-foot flame, [The War Zone reported](https://www.twz.com/news-features/meet-the-flamethrowing-robodog-named-theromantor?ref=amphibian.media). In the launch video, [a voice borrows](https://www.wideopenspaces.com/meet-the-thermonator-a-robot-dog-with-a-flamethrower/?ref=amphibian.media) Oppenheimer’s line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I have become death. The destroyer of worlds.”

ICE says it wants Spot for inspection, situational awareness and hazard assessment. Boston Dynamics’ terms require U.S. public safety and law enforcement customers to adopt a policy on how they use the robot and make that policy public before they deploy it, [WBUR reported](https://www.wbur.org/news/2026/08/31/ice-robot-dogs-immigration-enforcement-boston-dynamics?ref=amphibian.media). ICE has not said when or where the robots will be used or what training agents will get, and Boston Dynamics did not respond to WBUR’s questions about what happens when a customer breaks its rules. The answers would come from statements of work, training plans, and agency records that are not yet public.

When the Marines shelved LS3 in 2015, the spokesman for their Warfighting Lab, Kyle Olson told Military.com in 2015 that no one thought of a robot mule as a safe bet. 

"We tend to play with things that are fanciful and strange," he said.

Robot dogs are now being used by ICE, but they've also been tested on literal ice. A fourth-generation Vision 60, a four-legged robot made by Philadelphia-based Ghost Robotics, balances on ice in a promotional video the company posted to YouTube. A Vision 60 carrying a rifle appeared at an Army trade show in 2021, and the Department of Homeland Security tested Ghost robots for southern border patrols in 2022\. (Ghost Robotics [via YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ5G011RLy0&t=7s&ref=amphibian.media)) Hat tip to Jane Patterson for the ICE/ice punnery.

### SONG OF THE DAY:

**"Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1" — The Flaming Lips**

*Jane Patterson and Lilly Peacock contributed.*