Over the previous decade, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement company (Ice) has amassed thousands and thousands of knowledge factors that it makes use of to establish and monitor its targets – from social media posts to location historical past and, most not too long ago, tax info.
And there’s been one, multibillion-dollar tech firm significantly instrumental in enabling Ice to place all that information to work: Palantir, the information analytics agency co-founded by Peter Thiel, the rightwing mega-donor and tech investor.
For years, little was recognized about how Ice makes use of Palantir’s know-how. The corporate has persistently described itself as a “information processor” and says it doesn’t play an energetic position in any of its prospects’ information assortment efforts or what purchasers do with that info.
Now, a cache of inner Ice paperwork – together with tons of of pages of emails between Ice and Palantir, in addition to coaching manuals, and experiences on using Palantir merchandise – provide a few of the first real-world examples of how Ice has used Palantir in its investigations and through on-the-ground enforcement operations.
The paperwork, which have been obtained by immigrant authorized rights group Simply Futures Legislation by means of a Freedom of Info Act request and reviewed by the Guardian, largely cowl Palantir’s contract with Homeland Safety Investigations (HSI), the investigative arm of Ice that’s liable for stopping the “unlawful motion of individuals, items, cash, contraband, weapons and delicate know-how”.
The paperwork span the interval of 2014 to 2022, illustrating Palantir’s work with each Democratic and Republican administrations. However consultants say the insights are particularly alarming in mild of the second Trump administration’s unprecedented funding in Ice. Because the company chases aggressive deportation quotas, Ice is ready to achieve much more private information from federal businesses, together with the Inside Income Service, in addition to from new instruments similar to facial-recognition software program made by Clearview AI.
Palantir not too long ago gained a $30m contract to construct the federal government a brand new platform known as ImmigrationOS that may service Ice branches past HSI, and goals to “streamline” the identification and deportation of immigrants. Whereas the paperwork are largely restricted to HSI’s operations, it’s simple to see how the instruments may very well be of use to different branches of Ice.
“We’ve all the time recognized what the instruments Palantir constructed are able to. We now have the receipts for that,” mentioned Jacinta González, one of many authentic organizers behind the No Tech for Ice marketing campaign and the pinnacle of packages at digital rights non-profit MediaJustice.
The paperwork reveal how deeply embedded Palantir’s instruments have been in HSI’s day-to-day operations, serving to its brokers to research and arrest individuals utilizing a searchable super-network of presidency and personal databases.
They present the HSI crew used Palantir platforms and apps to trace air journey, analyze info like driver’s license scans and monitor individuals’s places utilizing cellular phone information.
In an instance that highlights the vastness of the information Ice has entry to: one March 2020 coaching doc detailed how Palantir software program allowed Ice brokers to go looking throughout information from the Pupil and Trade Customer Info System (Sevis), which on the time contained 4.9 million information “of non-immigrant college students, change guests and their dependents” relationship again to 2016. One other informed Ice brokers they may improve their investigations through the use of cellphone numbers or names extracted from telephones the brokers unlocked utilizing know-how from Cellebrite, an Israeli forensic software program firm that has had a contract with Ice since 2019.
“Palantir is the company spine of Ice that the company is counting on for surveillance and deportations,” mentioned Hannah Lucal, an information and tech fellow at Simply Futures Legislation. “Palantir has been utilized in Ice’s day-to-day operations for information surveillance round deportations and that’s been true for over a decade.”
Palantir spokesperson Lisa Gordon mentioned the corporate has been working with the Division of Homeland Safety since 2012 and the corporate “focuses on supporting the company’s investigations and operations – together with however not restricted to every little thing from stopping drug trafficking cartels to disrupting human trafficking networks”.
Ice didn’t reply to a request for remark.
A custom-built app for area operations
One of the vital revealing parts of the paperwork pertains to Falcon, a desktop and cell app Palantir custom-built for Ice.
Palantir gained the contract to construct Falcon in 2014, and designed it to assist brokers at HSI higher talk with their teammates and analyze information they gather. Ice stopped utilizing Falcon in 2022 in favor of an HSI-built device known as Raven.
The paperwork present Ice brokers used Falcon to assist run on-the-ground operations and report again. The app allowed brokers to trace their very own teammates’ and topics’ places, and document and share real-time info from in-person encounters similar to area interviews or scans of individuals’s licenses.
One doc confirmed that brokers may use Falcon to seek for individuals’s names, recognized places, autos or passport info in opposition to Division of Homeland Safety (DHS) and different federal databases just like the Enforcement Built-in Database (EID) – an unlimited database that holds biometric and private info on anybody who has been encountered or arrested, detained or deported by any DHS company – on the go.
For instance, in January 2019, Ice’s investigative unit was making ready for an anti-human-trafficking operation on the 53rd Tremendous Bowl in Atlanta, which DHS had designated a high-level safety occasion that would require “in depth federal interagency assist”. HSI was anticipated to deploy “dozens of brokers” for enforcement operations all through the weekend in groups that will rely closely on Falcon, emails between Ice brokers present. The brokers’ duties included “performing area interviews, evaluation, blueforce monitoring, command middle capabilities”, one HSI particular agent wrote.
Along with amassing and analyzing area interviews, the brokers used Falcon for “blueforce monitoring”, a navy time period for monitoring somebody’s GPS location. Coaching paperwork present Ice brokers may additionally use Falcon to trace an individual’s location, together with their “route and motion”, hour by hour utilizing cellular phone tower information.
Prematurely of the Tremendous Bowl operations, Ice officers dispatched a Palantir worker to Atlanta to refresh native brokers on how one can benefit from Falcon’s capabilities whereas within the area. When reporting again from the coaching, the Palantir consultant wrote in an e-mail that “brokers appeared fairly excited concerning the ease and energy of Falcon Cell to assist the operation” and significantly the “ease of the motive force’s license scanning”.
In one other case, Ice touted using Falcon to discover a goal’s location in a February 2018 gang “takedown” operation in New York. Falcon was used to plan a number of points of the operation, together with mapping out the gang’s organizational construction. When one of many targets was not on the preliminary location, Ice brokers used Falcon “to develop info for an additional deal with in Manhattan primarily based on a tip the goal was with relations”, the doc reads.
Embedding with Ice brokers and serving to them discover new methods to make use of Palantir merchandise was an enormous a part of sure staff’ jobs, in line with Olive Ratliff, a former Palantir worker who labored on the firm from 2021 to 2022. Palantir engineers acted as consultants, serving to prospects determine how one can use apps like Falcon, and have been incentivized to seek out new use instances “that the shopper hasn’t considered but” that will make Palantir merchandise extra integral to the shopper’s work. “Palantir’s entire enterprise mannequin is about upselling. That’s the one approach that they develop,” Ratliff mentioned.
An enormous and highly effective dataset
The paperwork additionally reveal the breadth of knowledge that Palantir enabled Ice to entry, permitting them to trace individuals throughout a number of databases, at instances on the request of different authorities businesses.
Each the Falcon app and one other Palantir-built platform, Investigative Case Administration (ICM), enabled Ice to entry a community of federally and privately owned databases of individuals’s info. Ice brokers have been inspired to add as a lot information as doable from area operations into Falcon and to share it with different Ice officers. “Importing information from sources not ingested into Falcon is a good way so as to add information that bolsters your investigation,” a Palantir coaching information reads.
One information detailed how one can import digital information from telephones that brokers had confiscated at US borders, or obtained in the middle of arrests and had unlocked utilizing Cellebrite know-how. The information indicated brokers may seek for cellphone numbers and names extracted from these telephones to see whether or not they got here up in databases already accessible by way of Palantir platforms. If an Ice agent confiscated somebody’s cellphone, noticed messages between that particular person and one other quantity, and wished to verify whether or not the recipient’s title or quantity got here up in different databases, they may search Sevis, for example, which on the time included almost 5 million information on scholar visa holders and their dependents.
“With greater than 7,000 businesses worldwide conducting 1.5 million legally licensed investigations yearly, we offer focused proof extraction and digital investigation capabilities below strict authorized oversight,” mentioned Cellebrite spokesperson Victor Cooper.
Emails additionally present Ice used Palantir merchandise to trace people throughout numerous databases on the behest of different businesses. In emails from June 2020, an agent in an HSI workplace in Arkansas requested for technical assist monitoring whether or not somebody being investigated by one other authorities company had boarded a flight. The emails present the brokers anticipated to have the ability to seek for this particular person throughout two DHS databases: the Advance Passenger Info System (Apis), which incorporates “pre-arrival and departure manifest information on all passengers and crew members”, and a Customs and Border Safety (CBP) border crossing database that tracks individuals, cargo and autos crossing by means of US ports of entry and exit.
“We acquired a request to find an individual from a accomplice company who has had in depth worldwide journey,” the e-mail learn.
Ice brokers have been additionally inspired to import info from databases not related to the Palantir instruments, together with subscription-based providers just like the investigative platform Thomson Reuters Clear, which collects info from information brokers like Equifax; information articles and social media posts; CBP border crossing information; and native, state, nationwide and worldwide legislation enforcement workplaces together with the FBI’s Nationwide Crime Info Heart.
Information collected within the ICM platform was, in some instances, made accessible to brokers in different components of Ice, together with models inside CBP, the Transportation Safety Administration and the US Coast Guard, emails from July 2019 present. A unit of immigration officers charged with arrests and removals, generally known as Enforcement and Elimination Operations, or ERO, was additionally in some instances given entry to Palantir platforms. ERO officers who have been on HSI taskforces have been required to “doc all investigative exercise” associated to the taskforce in Palantir’s ICM platform, a coverage memo printed in 2016 reveals.
Consultants concern that the Trump administration will begin to use the huge database community powered by Palantir to supercharge its deportation machine – which has already eliminated greater than 216,000 individuals within the first 9 months. Whereas Palantir didn’t contract with ERO earlier than, the corporate will now be working with this unit below the $30m contract.
“We really get to see Palantir offering these instructions for very intense information surveillance,” Lucal of Simply Futures Legislation mentioned. “Because the administration is doing this work to consolidate methods of state surveillance much more than it already is, Palantir stands to revenue from that.”
Consultants warn that, in mild of the Trump administration’s threats to crack down on “far-left” teams, the scope of utility for Palantir’s instruments may solely develop. Already, a brand new report from the Intercept revealed HSI subpoenaed and acquired info from Google about worldwide college students who have been being investigated over their pro-Palestinian activism.
“Now [with access to more federal databases] Ice can use this kind of surveillance equipment on anybody – not solely anybody who’s undocumented however anybody who this administration desires to criminalize and anybody who the administration desires to place below surveillance,” mentioned González of MediaJustice.
“Time and time once more, you’re seeing Ice act in methods which can be extremely violent and aggressive. It does have a chilling impact. When you realize they’ve a know-how that may monitor relationships, your conversations, and your organizing exercise, that may be a silencing power.”
