MPI: Seeking to Ramp Up Deportations, the Trump Administration Quietly Expands a Vast Web of Data

2025/06/03 Leave a comment

The surveillance state in action:

To help accomplish its aim of mass deportations, the Trump administration is tapping into numerous federal, state, and local databases at an unprecedented scale, and making more of them interoperable. The reach into and communication between information storehouses—including ones containing sensitive information about all U.S. residents’ taxes, health, benefits receipt, and addresses—allows U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other authorities to harvest, exchange, and share a vast trove of data. The aim of tapping government and commercial databases appears twofold: attempt to secure large-scale arrests and deportations of removable noncitizens, and instill a sense of fear so that others “self deport.”

The Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), launched by Elon Musk, has played an oversized role in this data-leveraging mission, accessing sensitive databases across government agencies and breaking down long-standing silos erected for operational and privacy reasons. And the software company Palantir, a longtime ICE contractor, has been awarded a new contract initially for $30 million to build a “streamlined” database to aid immigration enforcement.

Palantir’s Immigration Lifecycle Operating System (ImmigrationOS) will add to an already formidable arsenal of data available to ICE, including from the private sector. The agency is believed to be among the largest government purchasers of commercial credit, utility, motor vehicle agency, and other information—including airline passenger data, according to recent reporting. By one estimate, in 2022 ICE was able to know the addresses of three out of four U.S. adults—citizen and noncitizen alike.

ICE was established as part of the U.S. counterterrorism and homeland security machinery that was expanded in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. While the post-9/11 enterprise was aimed at foreign terrorists, today’s principal enforcement mission across a range of government agencies is to assist the Trump administration’s quest to carry out 1 million deportations annually.

The government’s tapping into databases with sensitive personal information—including databases never before used for large-scale immigration enforcement, such as voter information—has raised alarm among civil libertarians and security experts, who fear the potential for privacy violations for all U.S. residents and possible exploitation by nefarious actors.

This article looks at the recent efforts to expand ICE’s domestic surveillance and arrest capabilities by giving it access to new databases to build a vast, interoperable data network that can be used for immigration enforcement purposes, with the possibility of future implications for U.S. citizens. It places the current moves within a 25-year legacy of information-sharing initiatives in the immigration realm…

Source: Seeking to Ramp Up Deportations, the Trump Administration Quietly Expands a Vast Web of Data

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Palantir Admits to Helping ICE Deport Immigrants While Trying to Prove It Doesn’t

2020/10/01 Leave a comment

Yet more on Palantir:

Surveillance company Palantir has revealed more details about how it contributes to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation operations in a clumsy attempt to prove that it does no such thing.

On Monday, Amnesty International released a briefing laying out how Palantir’s failure to “conduct human rights due diligence” contributed to human rights abuses by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) against migrants and asylum-seekers. The briefing followed a letter sent by Amnesty to Palantir earlier in the month that asked the company to clarify its role in aiding ICE’s operations and if it has plans to mitigate harms caused by the agencies that Palantir’s technology empowers.

“Palantir touts its ethical commitments, saying it will never work with regimes that abuse human rights abroad,” said Michael Kleinman, Director of Amnesty International’s Silicon Valley Initiative. “This is deeply ironic, given the company’s willingness stateside to work directly with ICE, which has used its technology to execute harmful policies that target migrants and asylum-seekers.”

Palantir responded to Amnesty International with a letter of its own—a master class in hair-splitting that hit familiar points, used old arguments that have been dismissed, and accidentally admitted Palantir’s technology is used for deportations.

For years, Palantir has been quick to volunteer that it has no contracts with Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), an ICE subdivision that “identifies and apprehends removable aliens, detains these individuals when necessary and removes illegal aliens from the United States” as its primary mission. Instead, Palantir enters contracts with the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) subdivision of ICE. This subdivision, Palantir maintains, uses the surveillance company’s technology primarily for the purpose of “combating transnational crime such as money laundering, transnational gang activity, child exploitation, human smuggling, terrorist threats” and criminal activity in general.

While this may be true, the letter goes on to explain that HSI in fact conducts “workplace law enforcement” using Palantir’s technology. This enforcement includes compliance investigations and audits “confirming employer completion of I-9 forms documenting the legal status of its employees.” In other words, Palantir’s services are instrumental in ICE’s activities identifying undocumented people for detainment and deportation, even if, as it claims, it does not work with ERO directly.

As Palantir puts it: “…to be clear: Palantir’s software is not used as part of any deportation activities conducted by ERO as a consequence of worksite operations involving HSI.”

Even this admission, which tracks with Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s previous comments at Davos, does not describe the full scope of how Palantir contributes to ICE’s deportation operations. It has been clear since 2017 that the case management software Palantir provided to HSI has been widely available to ICE agents, including ERO officials, and deemed “mission critical” to the agency as a whole.

“HSI and ERO personnel use the information in ICM [Investigative Case Management system] to document and inform their criminal investigative activities and to support the criminal prosecutions arising from those investigations,” a 2016 Homeland Security disclosure reported on by The Intercept states. “ERO also uses ICM data to inform its civil cases.”

For years, HSI head Derek Benner has made targeting “illegal employment” a central part of the agency’s mission. In 2018, ICE made nearly ten times as many immigration arrests at workplaces than the previous year because of Benner’s belief that such targeting reduced “the continuum of crime that illegal labor facilitates, from the human smuggling networks that facilitate illegal border crossings to the associated collateral crimes, like identity theft, document and benefit fraud and worker exploitation.”

Under Trump, ICE’s workplace raids have not only quadrupled, but grown even larger as Palantir’s technology has empowered the agency to carry out operations like the series of Mississippi raids that arrested 680 people in one day—an operation confirmed last year to have used Palantir’s technology. Palantir’s technology has also been used to target, detain, and deport unaccompanied children and their families.

It is hard to understand why Palantir has continued to pretend that it doesn’t power deportation operations even in the face of a mountain of evidence, and even when it admits that HSI’s operations are part of the deportation pipeline. It may make more sense, however, in light of its S-1 filing documents, which admit that negative media coverage is a significant investment risk factor.

The hits are unlikely to stop coming, as a recent NYMag report suggests Palantir’s core value proposition—”a crystal ball you gaze into for answers”—may be a wild exaggeration using “smoke and mirrors” to obtain juicy government contracts and a dazzling $22 billion valuation ahead of its September 30 direct listing on the stock market.

As the company becomes public, the scrutiny and resistance it will face is likely to reveal a company that has branded itself as indispensable to the defense of liberalism, but in reality is busy pursuing a techno-nationalist project well-versed in the profitable art of constructing borders and policing them—and of terrorizing non-white migrants, asylum-seekers, foreigners, and citizens on either side of them.

Palantir did not immediately respond to Motherboard’s request for comment.

Source: Palantir Admits to Helping ICE Deport Immigrants While Trying to Prove It Doesn’t

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Big Data has allowed ICE to dramatically expand its deportation efforts.

2020/09/25 Leave a comment

Of note (Palantir hired former Canadian Ambassador to Washington to lead its Canadian operations):

A New Mexico man gets a call from federal child welfare officials. His teenage brother has arrived alone at the border after traveling 2,000 miles to escape a violent uncle in Guatemala. The officials ask him to take custody of the boy. He hesitates; he is himself undocumented. The officials say not to worry. He agrees and gives the officials his information. Seven months later, ICE agents arrest him at his house and start deportation proceedings.

A family in suburban Maryland gets a knock at their door. A child opens it. ICE agents enter and take away a man as his children watch. In the decades that he lived in this country as an unauthorized immigrant, the man never had a run-in with law enforcement. No, the agents explain as they walk him to their car: They found him because of the information he gave the Maryland DMV when he got a driver’s license.

For the past decade, ICE often found its targets in the interior of the U.S. by analyzing booking fingerprints from state and local jails. But the New Mexico and Maryland stories demonstrate a new trend: Increasingly, ICE is tapping much deeper wells of data to identify people for deportation. That’s possible in large part due to Palantir Technologies, a Silicon Valley start-up poised to go public Sept. 29 in the biggest tech stock listing since Uber. Palantir’s case management software, data analysis and visualization software, and mobile app are the final layer of ICE’s vast surveillance and data sharing network.

I have worked in technology policy for more than a decade. In most meetings, I am the only Latino in the room. I’m almost always the only Latinx immigrant. Much of my work focuses on how surveillance affects immigrants and people of color. Yet, even for me, it is hard to see the technology behind ICE’s brutality. Palantir’s public offering forces us to reckon with that dinfrastructure. As authorities separated thousands of children from their parents, used reunification interviews to track down and deport children’s relatives, and warehoused immigrants in fetid facilities where six children died in less than a year, they also consolidated a powerful and dangerous domestic surveillance dragnet.

For a long time, mass deportations were a small-data affair, driven by tips, one-off investigations, or animus-driven hunches. But beginning under George W. Bush, and expanding under Barack Obama, ICE leadership started to reap the benefits of Big Data. The centerpiece of that shift was the “Secure Communities” program, which gathered the fingerprints of arrestees at local and state jails across the nation and compared them with immigration records. That program quickly became a major driver for interior deportations. But ICE wanted more data. The agency had long tapped into driver address records through law enforcement networks. Eyeing the breadth of DMV databases, agents began to ask state officials to run face recognition searches on driver photos against the photos of undocumented people. In Utah, for example, ICE officers requested hundreds of face searches starting in late 2015. Many immigrants avoid contact with any government agency, even the DMV, but they can’t go without heat, electricity, or water; ICE aimed to find them, too. So, that same year, ICE paid for access to a private database that includes the addresses of customers from 80 national and regional electric, cable, gas, and telephone companies.

Amid this bonanza, at least, the Obama administration still acknowledged red lines. Some data were too invasive, some uses too immoral. Under Donald Trump, these limits fell away.

In 2017, breaking with prior practice, ICE started to use data from interviews with scared, detained kids and their relatives to find and arrest more than 500 sponsors who stepped forward to take in the children. At the same time, ICE announced a plan for a social media monitoring program that would use artificial intelligence to automatically flag 10,000 people per month for deportation investigations. (It was scuttled only when computer scientists helpfully indicated that the proposed system was impossible.) The next year, ICE secured access to 5 billion license plate scans from public parking lots and roadways, a hoard that tracks the drives of 60 percent of Americans—an initiative blocked by Department of Homeland Security leadership four years earlier. In August, the agency cut a deal with Clearview AI, whose technology identifies people by comparing their faces not to millions of driver photos, but to 3 billion images from social media and other sites. This is a new era of immigrant surveillance: ICE has transformed from an agency that tracks some people sometimes to an agency that can track anyone at any time.

This is where Palantir’s work for ICE comes into focus. A panoply of companies collect the data.
Palantir connects the dots. The firm helps agents access different databases, build profiles from disparate sources, from commercial data brokers to driver’s license records, and see how targets interrelate to each other. The company’s software appears to be part of the agency’s largest and most aggressive enforcement actions.

Indeed, the plan for the 2017 operation that first targeted the sponsors of unaccompanied immigrant kids, obtained by the immigrant rights group Mijente, reveals a complex web of interlocking agencies, including Health and Human Services, Customs and Border Protection, and two branches of ICE. To track the moving pieces, the paper repeatedly tells officials to enter data into “ICM,” ICE’s custom-built Investigative Case Management software. Who wrote that code? Palantir.

In its recent 310-page securities filing, Palantir makes no express mention of ICE, immigrants, deportations, or the controversy that its work for ICE has generated. Instead, in his letter to investors, CEO Alex Karp repeatedly touts Palantir’s commitment to the military and the intelligence community: “Our software is used to target terrorists and to keep soldiers safe,” he writes. When criticized, Karp has described Palantir’s work for ICE as “limited,” “a de minimis part of our work”—strange things for American contractor to say about its second–largest U.S. government client.

There is another way to read Palantir’s silence: Its leadership has decided that the cost of its work for ICE is de minimis, that in the eyes of its clients and the investing public it simply does not matter. As a Latino and an immigrant, I worry that on this point they will be right.

Source: Big Data has allowed ICE to dramatically expand its deportation efforts.

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