Leaked: Palantir Building Tool to Help ICE Locate Illegal Migrants

Palantir is taking on an increased role with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), including finding the physical location of illegal migrants who are marked for deportation, 404 Media reported.

The leak shows that Palantir’s work with ICE includes producing leads for law enforcement to find migrants to deport and keeping track of the logistics of Trump’s mass deportation effort, and provides concrete insight into the Trump administration’s wish to leverage data to enforce its immigration agenda.

The internal communications also show Palantir leadership preparing for a potential backlash from employees or outsiders, with them writing FAQs that can be sent to friends or family that start to ask about Palantir’s work with ICE.

“Hey all, wanted to provide a quick update on our work with ICE,” Akash Jain, the Chief Technology Officer of Palantir Technologies and President of Palantir USG, wrote in a Slack message several days ago. “Over the last few weeks we prototyped a new set of data integrations and workflows with ICE.”

“The new administration’s focus on leveraging data to drive enforcement operations has accelerated those efforts,” Jain wrote.

A page of an internal Palantir wiki obtained by 404 Media says Palantir participated in a three-week sprint, where developers rapidly work on new projects, with Homeland Security Investigations’ (HSI) Innovation Lab, which is the agency’s centralized hub for developing new advanced analytics capabilities and tools.

The primary focus of that sprint was providing immigration agents with “improved awareness about the criminality and location of individuals who have already received a final order of removal,” the wiki says.

That prototype was a success, and ICE updated an ongoing Palantir contract for the company to continue work on the project, the wiki says. The wiki says the project is related to “Enforcement Prioritization and Targeting,” and specifically to “support the development of an accurate picture of actionable leads based on existing law enforcement datasets to allow law enforcement to prioritize enforcement actions.”

404 Media first broke news of Palantir’s updated ICE contract on Wednesday. U.S. government contracting records said Palantir was paid tens of millions of dollars to deploy the new targeting and enforcement prioritization, and another record said Palantir was working on “complete target analysis of known populations.” Those additions, worth tens of millions of dollars, were added to Palantir’s $95.9 million contract with ICE for work on the Investigative Case Management (ICM) system, a powerful database and search tool the agency uses.

The leaked material contains more specifics on that work. Palantir’s role also includes a “self-deportation tracking” project, which is designed to help ICE develop a more accurate understanding of migrants who voluntarily leave the United States, and another project concerning “immigration lifecycle operations” which will support the logistics of deportation, such as overlaying information about detained or removed individuals and the availability of transportation resources, according to the wiki.

This effort will last around six months and “is concentrated on delivering prototype capabilities,” the wiki says. The wiki leaves open the potential for longer term engagements with ICE, saying that is currently to be determined “and we will aim to provide additional periodic updates as the situation develops.”