Over the past decade, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice) has amassed millions of data points that it uses to identify and track its targets – from social media posts to location history and, most recently, tax information.
And there’s been one, multibillion-dollar tech company particularly instrumental in enabling Ice to put all that data to work: Palantir, the data analytics firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, the rightwing mega-donor and tech investor.
For years, little was known about how Ice uses Palantir’s technology. The company has consistently described itself as a “data processor” and says it does not play an active role in any of its customers’ data collection efforts or what clients do with that information.
Now, a cache of internal Ice documents – including hundreds of pages of emails between Ice and Palantir, as well as training manuals, and reports on the use of Palantir products – offer some of the first real-world examples of how Ice has used Palantir in its investigations and during on-the-ground enforcement operations.
The documents, which were obtained by immigrant legal rights group Just Futures Law through a Freedom of Information Act request and reviewed by the Guardian, largely cover Palantir’s contract with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the investigative arm of Ice that is responsible for stopping the “illegal movement of people, goods, money, contraband, weapons and sensitive technology”.
The documents span the period of 2014 to 2022, illustrating Palantir’s work with both Democratic and Republican administrations. But experts say the insights are especially alarming in light of the second Trump administration’s unprecedented investment in Ice. As the agency chases aggressive deportation quotas, Ice is set to gain even more personal data from federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, as well as from new tools such as facial-recognition software made by Clearview AI.
Palantir recently won a $30m contract to build the government a new platform called ImmigrationOS that will service Ice branches beyond HSI, and aims to “streamline” the identification and deportation of immigrants. While the documents are largely limited to HSI’s operations, it’s easy to see how the tools could be of use to other branches of Ice.
“We’ve always known what the tools Palantir built are capable of. We now have the receipts for that,” said Jacinta González, one of the original organizers behind the No Tech for Ice campaign and the head of programs at digital rights non-profit MediaJustice.
The documents reveal how deeply embedded Palantir’s tools were in HSI’s day-to-day operations, helping its agents to investigate and arrest people using a searchable super-network of government and private databases.
They show the HSI team used Palantir platforms and apps to track air travel, analyze information like driver’s license scans and track people’s locations using cell phone records.
In an example that highlights the vastness of the data Ice has access to: one March 2020 training document detailed how Palantir software allowed Ice agents to search across data from the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (Sevis), which at the time contained 4.9 million records “of non-immigrant students, exchange visitors and their dependents” dating back to 2016. Another told Ice agents they could enhance their investigations by using phone numbers or names extracted from phones the agents unlocked using technology from Cellebrite, an Israeli forensic software company that has had a contract with Ice since 2019.
“Palantir is the corporate backbone of Ice that the agency is relying on for surveillance and deportations,” said Hannah Lucal, a data and tech fellow at Just Futures Law. “Palantir has been used in Ice’s day-to-day operations for data surveillance around deportations and that’s been true for over a decade.”
Palantir spokesperson Lisa Gordon said the company has been working with the Department of Homeland Security since 2012 and the company “focuses on supporting the agency’s investigations and operations – including but not limited to everything from stopping drug trafficking cartels to disrupting human trafficking networks”.
Ice did not respond to a request for comment.
A custom-built app for field operations
One of the most revealing elements of the documents relates to Falcon, a desktop and mobile app Palantir custom-built for Ice.
Palantir won the contract to build Falcon in 2014, and designed it to help agents at HSI better communicate with their teammates and analyze data they collect. Ice stopped using Falcon in 2022 in favor of an HSI-built tool called Raven.
The documents show Ice agents used Falcon to help run on-the-ground operations and report back. The app allowed agents to track their own teammates’ and subjects’ locations, and record and share real-time information from in-person encounters such as field interviews or scans of people’s licenses.
One document showed that agents could use Falcon to search for people’s names, known locations, vehicles or passport information against Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal databases like the Enforcement Integrated Database (EID) – a vast database that holds biometric and personal information on anyone who has been encountered or arrested, detained or deported by any DHS agency – on the go.
For example, in January 2019, Ice’s investigative unit was preparing for an anti-human-trafficking operation at the 53rd Super Bowl in Atlanta, which DHS had designated a high-level security event that could require “extensive federal interagency support”. HSI was expected to deploy “dozens of agents” for enforcement operations throughout the weekend in teams that would rely heavily on Falcon, emails between Ice agents show. The agents’ tasks included “performing field interviews, analysis, blueforce tracking, command center functions”, one HSI special agent wrote.
In addition to collecting and analyzing field interviews, the agents used Falcon for “blueforce tracking”, a military term for tracking someone’s GPS location. Training documents show Ice agents could also use Falcon to track a person’s location, including their “route and movement”, hour by hour using cell phone tower records.
In advance of the Super Bowl operations, Ice officials dispatched a Palantir employee to Atlanta to refresh local agents on how to take advantage of Falcon’s capabilities while in the field. When reporting back from the training, the Palantir representative wrote in an email that “agents seemed pretty excited about the ease and power of Falcon Mobile to support the operation” and particularly the “ease of the driver’s license scanning”.
In another case, Ice touted the use of Falcon to find a target’s location in a February 2018 gang “takedown” operation in New York. Falcon was used to plan several aspects of the operation, including mapping out the gang’s organizational structure. When one of the targets was not at the initial location, Ice agents used Falcon “to develop information for another address in Manhattan based on a tip the target was with family members”, the document reads.
Embedding with Ice agents and helping them find new ways to use Palantir products was a big part of certain employees’ jobs, according to Olive Ratliff, a former Palantir employee who worked at the company from 2021 to 2022. Palantir engineers acted as consultants, helping customers figure out how to use apps like Falcon, and were incentivized to find new use cases “that the client hasn’t thought of yet” that would make Palantir products more integral to the client’s work. “Palantir’s whole business model is about upselling. That’s the only way that they grow,” Ratliff said.
A vast and powerful dataset
The documents also reveal the breadth of information that Palantir enabled Ice to access, allowing them to track people across multiple databases, at times at the request of other government agencies.
Both the Falcon app and another Palantir-built platform, Investigative Case Management (ICM), enabled Ice to access a network of federally and privately owned databases of people’s information. Ice agents were encouraged to upload as much data as possible from field operations into Falcon and to share it with other Ice officials. “Importing data from sources not ingested into Falcon is a great way to add data that bolsters your investigation,” a Palantir training guide reads.
One guide detailed how to import digital files from phones that agents had confiscated at US borders, or obtained in the course of arrests and had unlocked using Cellebrite technology. The guide indicated agents could search for phone numbers and names extracted from those phones to see whether they came up in databases already accessible via Palantir platforms. If an Ice agent confiscated someone’s phone, saw messages between that person and another number, and wanted to check whether the recipient’s name or number came up in other databases, they could search Sevis, for instance, which at the time included nearly 5 million records on student visa holders and their dependents.
“With more than 7,000 agencies worldwide conducting 1.5 million legally authorized investigations annually, we provide targeted evidence extraction and digital investigation capabilities under strict legal oversight,” said Cellebrite spokesperson Victor Cooper.
Emails also show Ice used Palantir products to track individuals across various databases at the behest of other agencies. In emails from June 2020, an agent in an HSI office in Arkansas asked for technical support tracking whether someone being investigated by another government agency had boarded a flight. The emails show the agents expected to be able to search for this individual across two DHS databases: the Advance Passenger Information System (Apis), which includes “pre-arrival and departure manifest data on all passengers and crew members”, and a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) border crossing database that tracks people, cargo and vehicles crossing through US ports of entry and exit.
“We received a request to locate a person from a partner agency who has had extensive international travel,” the email read.
Ice agents were also encouraged to import information from databases not connected to the Palantir tools, including subscription-based services like the investigative platform Thomson Reuters Clear, which collects information from data brokers like Equifax; news articles and social media posts; CBP border crossing data; and local, state, national and international law enforcement offices including the FBI’s National Crime Information Center.
Data collected in the ICM platform was, in some cases, made accessible to agents in other parts of Ice, including units within CBP, the Transportation Security Administration and the US Coast Guard, emails from July 2019 show. A unit of immigration officers charged with arrests and removals, known as Enforcement and Removal Operations, or ERO, was also in some cases given access to Palantir platforms. ERO officers who were on HSI taskforces were required to “document all investigative activity” related to the taskforce in Palantir’s ICM platform, a policy memo published in 2016 shows.
Experts fear that the Trump administration will start to use the vast database network powered by Palantir to supercharge its deportation machine – which has already removed more than 216,000 people in the first nine months. While Palantir did not contract with ERO before, the company will now be working with this unit under the $30m contract.
“We actually get to see Palantir providing these directions for very intense data surveillance,” Lucal of Just Futures Law said. “As the administration is doing this work to consolidate systems of state surveillance even more than it already is, Palantir stands to profit from that.”
Experts warn that, in light of the Trump administration’s threats to crack down on “far-left” groups, the scope of application for Palantir’s tools could only grow. Already, a new report from the Intercept revealed HSI subpoenaed and received information from Google about international students who were being investigated over their pro-Palestinian activism.
“Now [with access to more federal databases] Ice can use this type of surveillance apparatus on anyone – not only anyone who is undocumented but anyone who this administration wants to criminalize and anyone who the administration wants to put under surveillance,” said González of MediaJustice.
“Time and time again, you’re seeing Ice act in ways that are incredibly violent and aggressive. It does have a chilling effect. When you know they have a technology that can track relationships, your conversations, and your organizing activity, that can be a silencing force.”
