Over the last few weeks multiple media outlets have reported on data analytics company Palantir’s closer collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as the agency carries out Trump’s mass deportation efforts. 404 Media first reported that Palantir was awarded tens of millions of dollars to work on improving ICE’s immigration targeting and enforcement systems. A day later, 404 Media published an article based on internal Palantir Slacks and a wiki which showed the company was engaged on a six-month project to help find the location of people flagged for deportation. That same day, ICE published a procurement document laying out similar details of the project, called “ImmigrationOS,” Business Insider reported.
WIRED then reported that DOGE is building a master database to track down immigrants, likely to be hosted on Palantir-developed software. Last week CNN corroborated that reporting and said that Palantir is involved in building the database. U.S. Representative Gerry Connolly said in a letter to the oversight body for the Social Security Administration (SSA) that an agency whistleblower told them the “master database” will use data from SSA, IRS, and Health and Human Services (HHS). 404 Media also reported that ICE plans to bring together data from HHS, the Department of Labor (DOL), and Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
Internally Palantir has justified its closer relationship with ICE because it believes its work can promote “efficiency, transparency, and accountability” and “enable fair treatment” of immigrants. ICE continues to deport some people with no due process.
It is rare for outsiders to see a tech company’s justification for working on such a divisive project. For that reason 404 Media is publishing the full wiki page in which Palantir discusses the project and the ethics around it.
404 Media has retyped the wiki to protect the source who provided it and spelled out some acronyms where necessary.
A Palantir spokeswoman told 404 Media in an email “Palantir's work with the U.S. Government has spanned many administrations, as we have worked with the Department of Homeland Security since 2010 and are non-partisan. While unfortunate that this internal communication has leaked, we hope it reflects the careful consideration that we apply to all our sensitive work. It is core to who we are to maximize our team's collective perspective and hold as sacred dialogue and debate around our work given the power of our platforms.”
“Palantir's language about ‘fair treatment and legal protections’ inverts the reality unfolding before us: government agents abducting a Columbia student and permanent resident at his citizenship interview, and deporting a Maryland father to a prison overseen by a dictator, despite courts deciding he could stay and compelling the government not to remove him,” Laura Rivera, an attorney at Just Futures Law, previously told 404 Media in an email. “Palantir distorts the truth to obscure its complicity in carrying out an authoritarian agenda, supplying one of the world's most powerful domestic surveillance agencies with tools to enable their mass surveillance not only of immigrants, but of all of us,” she added.
ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
The full wiki follows below.
[The wiki starts by saying Palantir has worked with ICE since the fall of 2010 as part of Operation Fallen Hero]
Palantir has been steadfast in its support of HSI's [Homeland Security Investigations, a part of ICE] pursuit of transnational criminal activity, primarily focused on counter-narcotics, counter-human trafficking, counter-child exploitation and counter-IP infringement investigations. We count this work as some of our most impactful in the United States.
Over the last few years, our work at HSI has remained relatively steady-state. ICM [Investigative Case Management system, a long running ICE people search tool Palantir has worked on] had a minor expansion in 2024 to include the ICE Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), which conducts internal investigations of ICE employees and handles detainee abuse claims. In late 2022, our prior Gotham analytics platform, FALCON, was sunset and replaced by an internal HSI development effort (RAVEn). From that point through early March 2025, our HSI contractual and program footprint has been focused solely on the ICM deployment.
During this period, Palantir engaged with HSI senior leaders to express our support for their mission and our concerns with the impact of their procurement efforts on operations in the field. As an example, when FALCON was sunset in late 2022 it had almost 3700 active users. RAVEn, by contrast, had a very small fraction of active users by fall 2024 after 5 years of development. Despite our continued engagement, HSI remained committed to their in-house development roadmap through the fall of 2024.
In late 2024, HSI leadership re-engaged Palantir about the state of their development efforts and market research to bring commercial software back into the investigative space. Coupled with the incoming administration's priorities, HSi's vision grew substantially more inclusive of ICE-wide efforts by March 2025. At that time, the HSI leadership team sought our assistance to accelerate mission progress across the agency.
Two main factors drove HSI's new sense of urgency: 1) clear failure by custom-developed projects to deliver real results for the field and 2) a renewed focus across ICE on immigration enforcement, which shined a light on the agency's data systems challenges and shortcomings. Because of this urgency, Palantir participated in a three week prototyping sprint at the HSI Innovation Lab. Based on the results of that sprint, we expanded the scope of our contract for the prototyping period.
Palantir is aligned with enabling immigration-focused agencies to utilize our platform to better track the immigration lifecycle and serve our national security while also promoting efficiency, transparency, and accountability. We provide the tools for our customers to enable fair treatment and legal protections for individuals across the spectrum of immigration status.
See previous ICE PCL [Privacy and Civil Liberties] FAQs for historical background covering our work with this customer, as well as ongoing exploratory discussions with partner agencies in DHS, including Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Scope
The primary focus of Palantir's initial three week sprint was centered on providing immigration enforcement agents with improved awareness about the criminality and location of individuals who have already received a final order of removal. The goal was to show how the platform could help make field operations more efficient and increase focus on the most serious criminals. This effort also helps to build transparency and accountability into the enforcement prioritization and tracking workflows through process mining metrics and near real-time updates to subject records reflecting both affirmative and derogatory changes to an individual's immigration status and criminality.
Based on the success demonstrated in three weeks, ICE issued an update to our ICM contract to enable us to further configure this workflow (1, below) as well as two additional priority projects:
1. Enforcement Prioritization and Targeting—support the development of an accurate picture of actionable leads based on existing law enforcement datasets to allow law enforcement to prioritize enforcement actions.
2. Self-deportation Tracking—support tracking of voluntary returns to help ICE develop a more accurate understanding of individuals who voluntarily leave the United States; and
3. Immigration Lifecycle Operations—support deportation logistics planning and execution, including overlaying information about individuals being detained or removed with facility and transport resource availability.
This new effort will last approximately six months and is concentrated on delivering prototype capabilities. How those translate into longer-term engagements and outcomes—including questions of scope, primary partnering agency, technology components, etc.—is currently TBD and we will aim to provide additional periodic updates as the situation develops.
Discussion—A Layer Down
What's consistent?
- Palantir remains fully committed to supporting HSI's transnational criminal investigative mission. We support data integration to drive investigations and analysis across HSI and partner agencies in areas ranging from countering human trafficking, stopping child exploitation, seizing illegal drugs, or supporting immigration enforcement actions. In addition, we will continue to pursue enhancements and new capabilities to ICM to provide deeper analytics and impact to HSI.
- Palantir remains committed to our enduring obligation to uphold privacy and civil liberty protections to the greatest extent possible through our product capabilities and impl [implementation] support efforts. Our work in this space is intended to promote government efficiency, transparency, and accountability. We believe these conditions are the necessary predicate to provide the tools to help ICE drive accurate enforcement actions and enable fair treatment and legal protections (including due process) for citizens and non-citizens.
What has changed?
- The national conversation around immigration enforcement, both at the border and in the interior of the United States, has shifted. The country is experiencing an increased (and bipartisan) public desire for more focused effort on border security and the enforcement of existing immigration law. This was a prominent element of both parties' recent campaigns, and with this level of attention there is both a lot of opportunity to do good work, as well as risk of potential harm.
- Palantir has developed into a more mature partner for ICE. We recognize that to really support the agency's immigration enforcement mission, we must expand our aperture beyond HSI's ICM and even HSI. This means supporting workflows that are substantially distinct from our historical scope and into Enforcement and Remove Operations (ERO). Facilitating data integration across the space of border protection, detention, and removal, especially given the risks to individuals who may be involved in enforcement actions, is critical to that mission. We want to support the Government with technology that helps improve the accuracy, efficiency, and transparency of the mission.
Risks and Mitigations
Palantir is cognizant of the risks to privacy and civil liberties involved in these mission sets and how they may be influenced by shifts in priorities. Immigration enforcement may undergo significant changes due to any number of factors over the next few years—agency consolidation, enforcement criteria, public opinion, agency and government priorities, the use of advanced Al, etc.—and we will continue to support our teams partnering with ICE to help navigate the terrain as it comes into focus, while providing the tools that will enable the mission in the most accurate, efficient, and transparent way.
Our approach to PCL will continue to be a key factor in this work, as it is across our commercial and government business. We recognize at the outset that the uncertainties and risks may shift the balance and focus of potential mitigations depending on how the agencies, policies, and prioríties evolve over time.
Many risks will not be within our means to address—some are structural and must be considered as fully baked into the equation by virtue of a willingness to engage at all in these efforts. It's important to note that there will be failures in the removal operations process. While our goal is to provide the government the best solutions to help minimize those effects, we also recognize that technology is not a panacea that will ensure that no adverse outcomes occur.
It's worth re-stating: we are pursuing this effort because we believe it is critical to national security and that our software can make a meaningful difference in the safety of all involved in enforcement actions. There are substantial areas of project scope, and product implementation, where we believe our work is well positioned to support meaningfully better outcomes:
- Data Quality—A significant risk in immigration enforcement workflows stems from data quality issues. Agencies face challenges due to fragmented data environments and limited trust in data accuracy, which is crucial for informed decision-making. Core Foundry data quality tooling may serve as a critical component for ensuring that decisions and actions reflect the most precise views of individual status and risk profiles.
- Agency Coordination—Involving numerous federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies in detainee processing can lead to miscommunications and duplicative or disproportionate actions. By integrating data, agencies can effectively deconflict their efforts, ensuring resources are focused on the most important enforcement initiatives.
- Additional Transparency—We are working with the ICE team to update and review privacy and oversight documentation, such as applicable Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs) and System of Record Notices (SORNs), to ensure that formal requirements and public reporting are conducted faithfully and consistent with the law.
PCL, leadership and legal team members will remain in close contact with the on-the-ground impl team to maintain a consistent understanding of facts on the ground, keep cadence with developments, issue spot new concerns, and help implement mitigation measures.
