USA: The architecture of deportation and Palantir's role in the new ICE system

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Images of masked operatives from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conducting raids in urban neighborhoods in search of allegedly illegal immigrants, dragging people out of vehicles, and searching apartments are currently not uncommon in the USA. President Donald Trump had announced a tough crackdown on immigration policy for his second term.

To achieve deportation goals, his administration is relying on technology from various providers and launched an advertising campaign with a direct message to "illegal aliens": "We will hunt you down." The company Palantir plays a central role in this, which, according to an exclusive contract for system modernization from January 2026, has "acquired profound institutional knowledge of ICE's operations through more than a decade of support." Journalist Michael Steinberger, who gained in-depth insights into the company's internal structures and political environment through his biography of Palantir CEO Alex Karp, assesses Palantir's role during Trump's first term as less significant. The protests and reporting at the time suggested. However, the crucial realization is that Palantir's technology can become a mighty tool in the hands of an authoritarian regime. "And now we are here," said Steinberger in an interview on January 22, 2026.

ImmigrationOS as a surveillance system

The core of ICE's investigative, search, and operational measures is the case management system ICM (Investigative Case Management), which has been based on Palantir's Gotham platform since 2014 and serves as the central information system for managing and analyzing investigative cases.

In April 2025, ICE awarded Palantir an approximately $30 million contract to develop the "Immigration Lifecycle Operating System" (ImmigrationOS), a deportation-focused extension of ICM for Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO). According to the tender, the system is intended to make the identification, prioritization, apprehension, and deportation of individuals residing irregularly more efficient and to map the entire deportation process from data capture to logistics.

However, ICE is not only relying on Palantir but is also expanding its immigration surveillance system by integrating additional data, services, and products from other companies. Data from public administration, authorities, and suppliers converge in the ICM. ICE obtains location data, for example, from commercial data brokers who aggregate and sell billions of daily location pings from various sources, such as mobile, app, or web data. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was able to obtain an internal ICE legal analysis which states that no warrant requirement rules would apply to "commercially available" data, as it originates from "public" or app-approved sources. It is not classified as "private" telecommunications data. ICE can therefore acquire and query it freely without needing a court order.

Data-driven control of raids and arrests

For the mass collection and consolidation of surveillance and location data, ICE uses products from the US provider Penlink, among others. Through the "Webloc" tool, movement and location data are analyzed, assigned to individual devices or identities, and displayed in chronological sequences and map views to identify movement patterns and recurring locations.

In addition, "Tangles," an AI-based open-source intelligence tool, is used to capture data from the open web, deep web, dark web, and social networks (posts, comments, images, metadata, and relationship information such as follower or friend networks, social graphs) and cross-reference it with temporal and spatial information (e.g., from Webloc). This allows online activities to be linked with real-world movements and relationships between individuals and profiles to be visualized.

The information thus obtained flows into the ICM case management system and serves as the basis for spatial and temporal analyses in operational planning. This includes, among other things, defining geofences, filtering devices based on technical identifiers, and reconstructing typical daily routines (work/doctor/church/supermarket/leisure/home) to determine probable locations.

According to a report by 404 Media, since September 2025, ICE has been using an app developed by Palantir called ELITE (Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement). This mobile tool allows operatives to access interactive maps with potential deportation targets (names, photos, alien numbers, addresses, confidence scores), filter by criteria such as criminality, location, or operations, and thus perform selection and prioritization on the go.

Furthermore, ICE operations increasingly involve operatives filming not only the individuals to be apprehended but also their surroundings and people present there. In Minneapolis, operatives equipped with GoPros and Meta's Smart Glasses have been spotted. ICE has also been working with Clearview AI for years and signed another contract in September 2025 to use facial recognition services for investigations by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). HSI is responsible for law enforcement (crime fighting) at ICE, while ERO (Enforcement and Removal Operations) carries out the actual deportations. Both use ICM.

A matter of national security

In January 2026, ICE awarded an exclusive contract to Palantir for the continued operation and further development of ICM. Although ICE reviewed the capabilities of 42 providers as part of its market research, it concluded that only Palantir could provide all the required functions with minimal risk to ongoing operations. The risk of relying on a proprietary system with Palantir is also accepted. This is because "Palantir's systems already capture and process data from multiple internal and external sources, making a potential transition to a new system to meet these requirements with a new provider extremely complex and associated with increased risk." Awarding the contract to another provider would be "unacceptable" due to "the mission criticality and urgency of the President's Executive Orders" and would lead to a "threat to national security."

In Germany, individual security authorities, such as police departments in Bavaria, Hesse, and North Rhine-Westphalia, also rely on Palantir products despite criticism. The German federal government also purchases from data brokers. When asked whether products from Penlink or similar providers are used for processing mobile phone location data or other personal data, the German federal government states in its response to a minor inquiry by the Left Party (Printed Paper 21/3280) that such questions "cannot be answered for reasons of state security for the Federal Criminal Police Office, the Federal Police, and the Central Office for Information Technology in the Security Sector – not even in classified form." In Austria, there is a similar inquiry to the federal government; the response is still pending there.

(vza)