Last week Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) paid contracting giant Palantir tens of millions of dollars to make modifications to a powerful ICE database and search tool to allow “complete target analysis of known populations” and to update the tool’s targeting and enforcement priorities, according to procurement records reviewed by 404 Media.
The records show that Palantir is actively working on, and making updates to, the technical infrastructure underpinning the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts. The news comes after ICE agents arrested a green card holding student at his interview to become a U.S. citizen; plainclothes officers picked up a student on the street for deportation despite the State Department finding no evidence she was linked to antisemitism or Hamas as claimed; and the American and El Salvadorian presidents deflecting when asked who was going to return a man who was mistakenly deported to a foreign mega prison. Trump has also called for deporting U.S. citizens to El Salvador.
At the same time, Palantir is 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.”
“As a whole, extending Palantir’s services with intentionally vague corporate-speak phrasing coupled with ICE’s recent public escalation of violating people’s rights via harassment, deportation without a basis, and terrorizing immigrants paints a clear picture: Palantir’s engagement with ICE is facilitating and enabling abuses and violation of rights—rights like due process which, I want to note, extend to all in the US, regardless of citizenship status,” Calli Schroeder, senior counsel and global privacy counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), told 404 Media in an email after reviewing screenshots of the records.
