Palantir, the surveillance giant, is taking on an increased role with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), including finding the physical location of people who are marked for deportation, according to Palantir Slacks and other internal messages obtained by 404 Media.
The leak shows that Palantir’s work with ICE includes producing leads for law enforcement to find people 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 people 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.”
Neither Palantir nor ICE immediately responded to 404 Media’s requests for comment.
In the wiki, Palantir says it continues to support “HSI’s transnational criminal investigative mission,” which can include countering human and drug trafficking. The initial coding sprint came about after HSI sunsetted a tool based on Palantir’s Gotham product with nearly 3,700 users in late 2022, developed its own in-house system called RAVEn, then came back to Palantir in late 2024 after that project failed, the wiki says. By March 2025, because of the Trump administration’s focus on immigration and a “new sense of urgency” according to Palantir, “the HSI leadership team sought our assistance to accelerate mission progress across the agency,” the wiki says.
Palantir writes it “remains committed” to “privacy and civil liberty protections,” and says it believes this work with ICE is “intended to promote government efficiency, transparency, and accountability.”
“We believe these conditions are the necessary predicate to provide the tools to help ICE drive accurate enforcement actions and enable fair treatment and legal protections (including due process) for citizens and non-citizens,” the wiki says.
“Palantir is cognizant of the risks to privacy and civil liberties involved in these mission sets and how they may be influenced by shifts in priorities,” another section reads. “Many risks will not be within our means to address—some are structural and must be fully baked into the equation by virtue of a willingness to engage at all in these efforts. It’s important to note that there will be failures in the removal operations process,” it adds.
The Trump administration has deported more than 200 people it says are hardened criminals to an El Salvadoran mega prison with no due process. A CBS News 60 Minutes investigation found that 75 percent of the men deported had no apparent criminal record. As part of that, the U.S. deported Abrego Garcia to the foreign prison: A government lawyer has said Garcia’s deportation was an “administrative error”, and despite the Supreme Court ruling that the government must “facilitate” Garcia’s return, President Trump and El Salvadoran President Bukele have deflected when asked if they will do so. On Wednesday the Department of Justice released documents to support its targeting of Garcia.
President Trump has also called for deporting U.S. citizens to El Salvador.
On top of the El Salvador prison deportations, the Trump administration has revoked the visas of hundreds of students, many under the pretence that they engaged in antisemitism or supported Hamas. Plainclothes officers picked up a student on the street for deportation despite the State Department finding no evidence she was linked to Hamas or antisemitism; the justification used was an op-ed she co-wrote criticizing Israel’s disproportionate level of violence in Gaza. ICE agents arrested a green card holding student who participated in college protests at his interview to become a U.S. citizen. A judge recently ruled that Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil, who was among the first students arrested by ICE, can be deported.
“Palantir’s language about ‘fair treatment and legal protections’ inverts the reality unfolding before us: government agents abducting a Columbia student and permanent resident at his citizenship interview, and deporting a Maryland father to a prison overseen by a dictator, despite courts deciding he could stay and compelling the government not to remove him,” Laura Rivera, an attorney at Just Futures Law, told 404 Media in an email.
“Palantir distorts the truth to obscure its complicity in carrying out an authoritarian agenda, supplying one of the world’s most powerful domestic surveillance agencies with tools to enable their mass surveillance not only of immigrants, but of all of us,” she added.
In its wiki Palantir says the national conversation around immigration has “shifted,” with both parties campaigning on the issue. With this, “there is both a lot of opportunity to do good work, as well as risk of potential harm,” the wiki says.
In the leaked Slack messages, Jain said that Palantir was working to include updates about this work into an FAQ with the company’s PCL, or Privacy and Civil Liberties team. Jain said the company will also hold “discussion groups” about the topic.
“I recognize this is a topic of interest for a lot of hobbits and we’re working to integrate these updates into the PCL FAQ,” Jain added, with “hobbits” a likely reference to J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which Palantir gets its name from.
“We recognize as this becomes more public you will probably be asked about what’s fact vs. fiction from friends, family, candidates and customers,” Jain wrote, adding that the company is working on another FAQ that could be shared externally in those situations.
John Grant, Palantir’s “Ethics Education Program Lead,” posted links to some internal pages “that might help people think through some of the questions this work might raise for you.” They were:
- Ethics FAQ – “Can it be right to support a customer who you think is wrong?”
- Ethics Discussion – The Ethics of Immigration
Jain added that the small group discussions will likely be organized locally in each office or business area.
Palantir is currently running adverts at U.S. colleges which say “a moment of reckoning has arrived for the West. Our culture has fallen into shallow consumerism while abandoning national purpose. Too few in Silicon Valley have asked what ought to be built—and why. We did.”
Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said at the recent Border Security Expo that his intention for the agency is squads of trucks detaining immigrants in a similar way to how Amazon trucks are around the country delivering packages, the Arizona Mirror reported.
The wiki says “Palantir has developed into a more mature partner for ICE.”