ICE Buys $30M in Palantir Tech to Track Immigrants

Leaked internal Slack messages within Palantir, received by 404 Media, showcase a very dark future for immigration deportations. Palantir is an American company that specializes in software platforms for big data analytics.

With your tax dollars, ICE is contracting out Palantir to receive more add ons to a software called “ImmigrationOS” which tracks visa overstays and self deportations. ICE says that this deal is absolutely needed in order to carry out Trump’s immigration enforcement mandate.

VIA Business Insider

Their claim? This software will ‘minimize time and resource expenditure” for ICE to detain immigrants more swiftly. It will work by helping find undocumented immigrants through location flagging. They say that it will have three core functions:

1. Targeting and Enforcement Prioritization

2. Streamline “selection and apprehension operations of illegal aliens”

3. Prioritize removal of “violent criminals, gang member and visa overstays”

They also want to add the “Immigration Lifecycle Process” function which would speed up the identification of undocumented immigrants and their removal of the United States with the end goal of making deportation logistics faster.

The software prototype which is expected to be delivered by September 25 will include “near real-time visibility into instances of self-deportation”.

But here’s the thing: you can’t only blame Trump for this.

The agreement is actually an extension of a contract the Biden administration signed with Palantir in 2022 for what he claimed was “operations and maintenance” support services. To take it back further, the Department of Homeland Security first contracted Palantir to build its case management system in 2014, under Obama’s presidency. They have been an ICE contractor since 2011, but they started doing various work with other government agencies since 2007. This includes but is not limited to the US Army/Navy, IRS, and FBI. They’re also helping DOGE build a “mega API” that the IRS could search for records across all various databases that the agency works with.

Is Donald Trump taking this to the extreme? Absolutely, but in my opinion, both Democrats and Republicans are to blame for this ever growing dystopian relationship between Palantir and the government.

In order for the software to work, it collects data from a huge range of government databases and allows DHS agents to keep detailed records on possible immigration violators for future enforcement actions. Which includes:

“Data sharing with Customs and Border Protection for lookout and seizure tracking.”

Per 404 media, Palantir employee focus over the past couple of weeks has been to increase ICE abilities to track immigrants who have received final order of removal. Although they claim that these expensive software updates are to focus on gang members and violent criminals, so far the majority of people deported have not been in that category.

In brief, the leaked Palantir Slack messages reveal a shocking speed-up of the U.S. government's surveillance and deportation machine—one that is both intensely bipartisan and stealthily decades in the making.

Trump's rhetoric and policy goals may be the most authoritarian, but the foundations of this technological crackdown were laid by previous administrations of both parties. What's happening here is not only a tale of one president's agenda, but of how deeply entrenched firms like Palantir are in federal enforcement agendas.

With taxpayer dollars, the government is constructing tools that turbocharge ICE's capacity to monitor, detain, and deport—with ever fewer checks and balances and increasing automation. This ought to trouble any person who cares about transparency, privacy, and human rights, independent of political leaning.