All the Ways Palantir is Assisting Trump’s Abusive Removal Campaign

Subscribe to the Free Future Newsletter
Free Future home

There’s been a lot of coverage of the technology company Palantir recently and its role in providing tools to facilitate the violence, lawlessness, and human rights violations of President Trump’s war on immigrants. We thought it would be useful to lay out the main prongs of what we know about the company’s participation in that campaign.

We at the ACLU have been following Palantir since at least 2011. In 2018 we wrote about how the company was helping the city of New Orleans build a “deeply problematic” predictive policing risk assessment database incorporating “threat scores.” Over the years, the company seems to have been involved in opaque ways with US security and other agencies in a period when those agencies really began exploring ways to use newly available mass surveillance data and analytics to achieve various goals.

Now the company’s involvement in questionable government uses of mass data has reached a new level of clarity, with Amnesty International calling out the company’s responsibility under United Nations human rights principles to “immediately cease their work” with the Trump deportation program. Given the lack of transparency that still exists, it can be hard to know the depth of Palantir’s integration into the U.S. domestic security apparatus, but a combination of investigative journalism, company disclosures, and agency documentation point to four products and programs that seem to be at the heart of the company’s involvement.

1. "ELITE” system for data on targets
Palantir’s Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement (“ELITE”) system is used in immigration enforcement operations for “identifying and prioritizing high-value targets through advanced analytics,” as its user guide puts it. According to an investigation by 404 Media, which obtained the guide, the app populates a map interface with targets for potential deportation — not only providing the location of targeted individuals and an “address confidence score,” but also allowing ICE officers to view additional information on potential targets, including their name, photo, Alien number, and date of birth.

But the system goes further, apparently providing information not only about specific people who have been deemed targets for deportation, but also about others who are near certain locations. ICE is using it, 404Media reports, to find locations where “lots of people it might detain could be based” — “target rich” areas where officers can most efficiently move toward fulfilling the deportation quotas they are being pressured to meet.

In court testimony, ICE agents said that the app displayed the numbers of people with an “immigration nexus” in particular locations, defined broadly as anyone who has had dealings with an immigration agency, even including naturalized US citizens.

The guide indicates the system draws on sensitive data from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and “CLEAR,” which is most likely the law enforcement commercial data broker product sold by Thompson-Reuters that offers access to a vast array of data about people. We already know that DHS is circumventing the Constitution by buying data that it would normally need a warrant to access. The user guide, 404Media reports, also says ominously that ELITE is “integrating new data sources,” raising concerns that further sensitive information will be fed into the technology’s dragnet.

The most recent DHS AI Use Case Inventory portrays ELITE’s “AI-driven outputs” as relatively limited, and promises “human oversight and additional verification steps” and “human analysis and validation.” Of course, we know that purveyors of AI technologies often promise humans in the loop — but that such oversight over AI outputs always seems to fall by the wayside. Based on 404Media’s investigation, the inventory appears to significantly understate the scope and power of Palantir’s product.

2. The Investigative Case Management platform
DHS’s Investigative Case Management (ICM) platform functions as the backbone of the agency’s immigration enforcement apparatus in the United States. As the name suggests, the ICM is for managing cases — supporting ICE through the lifetime of a criminal or civil detention and deportation case. But documents obtained by the Intercept suggest that, as the outlet sums it up, “the system is far from a passive administrator of ICE’s case flow.” The ICM not only provides standard case-tracking capabilities but also, as DHS’s Privacy Impact Assessment for the ICM notes, allows users to “perform investigative research” to build cases against individuals.

We can only imagine what that looks like within the Trump deportation campaign, pressured as it is to deport far more immigrants than there are who have committed crimes.

To facilitate such case building, the system incorporates vast amounts of data from various agency platforms, including the FBI, DEA, ATF, and SEVIS (the platform used to monitor students or exchange visitors who are temporarily in the US). Agents can use the ICM to search across an ecosystem of interconnected platforms, returning information as detailed and personal as an individual’s:

• Schooling
• Family relationships
• Employment information
• Phone records
• Immigration history
• Foreign exchange program status
• Personal connections
• Biometric traits
• Criminal records
• Home and work addresses.

In addition to pulling data from various federally and privately owned databases, internal training documents reveal that ICE agents are encouraged to upload data to the ICM from other sources, including field operations. Reporting by the Guardian on a cache of ICE internal training documents, for example, revealed that agents were instructed on how to extract and upload files from phones seized at the US border or in the course of arrest.

The data housed within the ICM isn’t limited to people who make contact with the U.S. immigration system. An ICM funding document states that “U.S. Citizens are still subject to criminal prosecution and thus are a part of ICM.”

The ICM has been run by Palantir since 2014 (and Palantir has secured a sole source deal to continue developing the software through at least April 2026). A contract between ICE and Palantir notes specifically that the “ICM is based on Palantir’s proprietary solution that has already been configured specifically for ICE’s operational needs.” The privacy interests implicated by the sweeping amounts of data caught up in the ICM have led to litigation against ICE, including a 2017 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

3. ImmigrationOS to monitor and track immigrants
According to ICE contract documents, the Immigration Operating System or ImmigrationOS is an augmentation of the ICM, possibly using AI, that seeks to parse vast amounts of data in service of three main priorities of the Trump Administration’s mass deportation agenda:

• “Streamlining selection and apprehension operations of illegal aliens” to identify and prioritize individuals targeted for deportation on the basis of criteria such as immigration records, criminal histories, and prior affiliations.
• Monitoring and tracking “self-deportations” and visa overstays with “near real-time visibility.” This technology comes directly on the heels of the Trump administration’s directive to immigrants illegally living in the United States to “self-deport.”
• Providing logistical support to minimize inefficiencies throughout the deportation process “from identification to removal.” (ICE terms this “immigration lifecycle management.”)

ICE entered a $30 million contract with Palantir in April 2025 to upgrade the ICM with those capabilities. The system is intended to enhance the existing ICM platform, leveraging the vast amounts of personal data from private and public entities accessible within the ICM.
Funding to build the ImmigrationOS platform was incorporated into the existing sole-source ICM deal, which has ballooned to over $145 million. A prototype of ImmigrationOS was scheduled for delivery to the agency on September 25, 2025, with the contract running through September 2027.

4. ICE Tip Processing
The 2025 DHS AI Use Case Inventory also makes mention of a newly deployed “AI-Enhanced ICE Tip Processing” program purchased from Palantir. The software uses generative AI to summarize and categorize incoming tips to ICE, as well as translate non-English tips into English. Although there is little transparency or reporting into this product, Wired suggests that this system may be an AI upgrade to the previous tip synthesis tool known as FALCON, used by ICE since 2012.

A problematic role
Palantir’s CEO has publicly claimed that his company’s tools promote, rather than degrade, civil liberties, for example by ensuring that “that the state and its agents can see only what ought to be seen.” But, given what has been disclosed publicly, it’s hard to put much stock in the company’s claims. Among the troubling themes that appear to characterize Palantir’s work for ICE are:

• Consolidation of government data. Palantir’s consolidation of government data typically separated within siloed agency databases amounts to the creation of centralized dossiers of information on individuals within the US immigration system — dossiers that aren’t limited to violent criminals, but include visa holders and even U.S. citizens swept up in Palantir’s data dragnet. Such data consolidation, which Congress sought to limit in the Privacy Act of 1974, significantly increases the risk of data misuse by bad actors within Palantir or ICE and by external hackers, as my colleague Cody Venzke explains in an ACLU white paper.
• Use of private-sector data. We know that agencies such as DHS and the FBI are purchasing personal data on Americans from private data brokers for information that they would normally need a warrant to seek. The House of Representatives voted to block law enforcement from doing such end runs in 2024, but the legislation did not pass the Senate. (The bill may come up for future votes and could still be enacted.)
• Lack of transparency and oversight. We know little about the selection criteria and algorithms used for identifying targets for deportations, the fairness or bias of those algorithms, their transparency, or their compatibility with due process rights.

How culpable is the company?
At the end of the day, ultimate responsibility for the Trump Administration’s ICE kidnapping campaign lies with the Trump Administration itself. But the stench of the campaign’s cruel, brutal, and lawless character inevitably carries over to any company that, like Palantir, participates in facilitating those constitutional and human rights violations and plays a key role in carrying it out. But the company is even more culpable to the extent that they:

• Drive demand for their services within the government (“here’s something you should pay us to build”) rather than simply responding to it (“yes we could do that”).
• Are building bespoke solutions as opposed to applying tools of general applicability. Nobody would blame Microsoft if CBP were using an Excel spreadsheet in their abusive operations, for example, but custom-built applications tailored for the removal campaign are a different matter.
• Are building things that few, if any, other companies have the expertise to build, as opposed to applications that a wide variety of companies could build just as well.
• Are building applications that are customized to the Trump Administration’s specific goals and tactics — mass removal without due process, random identity checks, racial profiling, etc. — rather than for a more general government capability for legally proper and reasonably targeted removal operations.

We don’t know the full answers to these questions. What we do know is that Palantir’s tools form the backbone for ICE’s mass deportation regime, that Palantir employees are deeply embedded within the agencies they serve — and that even among those employees there is dissension and doubt about the company's role. In justifying its sole-source ImmigrationOS contract, ICE noted that “Palantir remains the sole provider capable of meeting the specific needs and requirements of ICE,” and that “Palantir has developed deep institutional knowledge of ICE operations over more than a decade of support.” The company’s work cannot be separated from the constitutional and human rights violations of Trump’s deportation drive.