ICE Built a $30M AI System to Deport Immigrants

Palantir's ImmigrationOS creates AI dossiers, assigns address confidence scores, and tracks self-deportations in near real-time. There's nothing stopping it from being used on citizens.

State of Surveillance Editorial Team

Rows of illuminated server racks in a dark data center with blue and green lights
Photo via Unsplash

TL;DR: ICE awarded Palantir $30 million to build ImmigrationOS, an AI platform that identifies deportation targets, assigns "address confidence scores," and tracks self-deportations in near real-time. But ImmigrationOS is just the latest layer in a surveillance stack that already includes ELITE (which pulls data from Medicaid, tax records, and commercial data brokers to map "target-rich" areas), the Investigative Case Management system (which consolidates FBI, DEA, ATF, and student visa databases into searchable dossiers), and Mobile Fortify (which matches faces against 200 million photos from a phone). Civil liberties groups warn the system captures data on naturalized citizens and legal residents by design, not by accident. As of 2022, ICE could locate three out of four American adults through utility records alone. The expansion hasn't slowed. It's accelerated.

The $30 Million Upgrade Nobody Voted For

In May 2025, DHS quietly awarded Palantir a $30 million contract to build ImmigrationOS: the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System. The name says it all. This isn't a tool for investigating specific crimes. It's a platform designed to manage a person's entire "immigration lifecycle" from identification through removal.[1]

Palantir was supposed to deliver a working prototype by September 2025. The contract runs through September 2027, with a total potential value of $159 million if all options are exercised.[2]

ImmigrationOS has three core capabilities:

  • Targeting and enforcement prioritization: AI-driven identification and ranking of people for deportation based on visa status, criminal records, and data aggregated from dozens of federal and commercial databases
  • Self-deportation monitoring: Near real-time tracking of people who leave the country on their own, with automated verification
  • Logistics management: Optimization of the detention-to-removal pipeline, from apprehension scheduling to flight booking

ImmigrationOS is an upgrade to Palantir's Investigative Case Management system, which ICE has used since 2014. ICM already consolidates data from the FBI, DEA, ATF, the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), and commercial data brokers into unified searchable profiles. ImmigrationOS adds AI on top of that foundation: pattern detection, automated flagging, predictive targeting.[3]

ELITE: The Tool That Maps Where to Find You

Before ImmigrationOS, there was ELITE: Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement. ELITE is the Palantir-built tool that an ICE agent described to reporters as being like "Google Maps" for deportation targets.[4]

Here's how it works: ELITE pulls data from HHS, USCIS, and the commercial investigative platform CLEAR (owned by Thomson Reuters). It cross-references addresses, utility records, phone numbers, family relationships, and government benefit enrollments to generate dossiers on individuals. Then it assigns an "address confidence score," a probability estimate of whether a person will be at a specific location at a given time.[3]

Agents open ELITE, search an area, and the system maps "target-rich" zones: neighborhoods with high concentrations of people who have some kind of immigration connection. The connection doesn't have to be illegal. ELITE broadly defines "immigration nexus" to include naturalized citizens, green card holders, asylum applicants, and anyone who has ever interacted with the immigration system.[3]

In January 2026, Fortune reported that ELITE was drawing data from Medicaid databases to generate leads on people ICE believed might be deportable, effectively weaponizing healthcare enrollment against the people who signed up for it.[5]

If you're a naturalized citizen who once applied for a green card and happen to live in a neighborhood with a high ELITE score, your address is on a map that ICE agents check before they go to work in the morning.

The Data Web: Three Out of Four American Adults

ImmigrationOS and ELITE don't operate in isolation. They sit on top of a data infrastructure that's been expanding for over a decade.

A 2022 study by Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology found that ICE could locate three out of four American adults through utility records and had scanned one in three Americans' driver's license photos.[6] That was before the current expansion.

Since then, ICE has added:

  • Thomson Reuters CLEAR: A $5 million subscription purchased in May 2025 for license plate reader data, address histories, vehicle registrations, family and associate linkages, and proprietary commercial datasets[7]
  • Mobile Fortify: NEC's smartphone facial recognition app that matches faces against 200+ million photos in federal databases. Used over 100,000 times since June 2025[8]
  • Penlink's Webloc: A geofencing tool that lets agents draw a box on a map and track every phone inside it. ICE purchased a subscription in September 2025[9]
  • Clearview AI: A $3.75 million contract (ICE's largest facial recognition purchase to date) giving agents access to billions of scraped photos from social media[10]
  • BI2 Technologies iris scanners: $4.6 million for smartphone-based iris scanning that can identify a person's eye from 15 inches away[11]

DOGE has been breaking down the data silos that previously kept these systems separate. Tax records, Social Security databases, and benefits enrollment data that were once walled off from immigration enforcement are now flowing into the same Palantir-powered infrastructure.[6]

Mission Creep: When Immigration Enforcement Becomes Mass Surveillance

The American Immigration Council published an analysis in April 2026 with a blunt title: "Mission Creep: AI Surveillance at DHS Crosses Dangerous Line Into Tracking Americans."[12]

Their argument is straightforward: facial recognition, biometric scanning, social media monitoring, and location tracking (all justified as tools for immigration enforcement) are now being used to identify and investigate U.S. citizens. That's not a bug. It's how these systems were designed.

ELITE's "immigration nexus" definition is broad enough to capture naturalized citizens. ICM's database includes records on people with "limited immigration contact." Mobile Fortify scans every face, not just faces belonging to people with deportation orders. Penlink's Webloc geofences capture every phone in an area: citizens, residents, tourists, everyone.

In Minnesota, ICE deployed social media monitoring and location-tracking systems that company marketing materials explicitly describe as tools for monitoring protests and public gatherings protected under the First Amendment.[12]

Hours after the co-owner of a St. Paul toy store criticized the federal government's immigration crackdown during a national television interview, federal agents showed up to audit employee records.[12] In Minneapolis, ICE collected the personal information of Alex Pretti (a protester) days before agents shot and killed him during an enforcement operation in January 2026.[13]

Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told Congress: "There is no database that's tracking United States citizens." But White House border czar Tom Homan told Fox News he planned to "create a database" of people who interfere with ICE, and that he'd "make them famous." DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said "videotaping" agents constitutes violence.[14]

Whether they call it a tracking database or not, the infrastructure already exists. ImmigrationOS just made it smarter.

The Budget That Supercharged Everything

The "One Big, Beautiful Bill" passed in summer 2025 transformed ICE into the most highly funded law enforcement agency in the country. The Washington Post reported that the new budget gave ICE billions in new funding specifically for surveillance technology: biometric trackers, cellphone location databases, spyware, and drones.[15]

The bill also loosened restrictions on how ICE uses some of these tools. Procurement records show ICE is spending over $300 million on social media monitoring, facial recognition, license plate readers, and location tracking services under the new budget authority.[4]

Before the bill, some of these data sources required interagency agreements or court orders. After the bill, ICE has more direct access to more databases with fewer procedural hurdles. The Brennan Center described it as the creation of a "deportation-industrial complex."[16]

What This Means for You

If you're a U.S. citizen, here's the uncomfortable math:

  • ICE can probably find you. Three out of four American adults were locatable through utility records alone as of 2022. That was before ImmigrationOS, ELITE, CLEAR, Webloc, and the DOGE-enabled data sharing across federal agencies.
  • Your face is in the system. One in three Americans had their driver's license photo scanned by ICE as of 2022. Mobile Fortify adds 200 million more federal photos. Clearview AI adds billions of social media images.
  • Attending a protest can get you flagged. ICE has geofencing tools that track every phone at a location, social media monitoring tools marketed for protest surveillance, and a documented pattern of retaliating against people who observe immigration operations.
  • Your healthcare data may be feeding the system. ELITE pulled from Medicaid databases to generate deportation leads. If DOGE continues breaking down data silos, more benefits databases could follow.

Immigration enforcement has always required some surveillance capability. But a system that can locate three-quarters of all Americans, scan a third of their faces, geofence their phones, monitor their social media, pull their medical records, and assign AI confidence scores to their home addresses isn't immigration enforcement. It's a domestic surveillance apparatus that happens to be run by an immigration agency.

How to Reduce Your Exposure

  • Limit your biometric footprint. Opt out of facial recognition at airports when offered the choice. TSA's opt-out is still available (for now). Wearing sunglasses and face coverings in public reduces Mobile Fortify's effectiveness.
  • Check data broker profiles. Thomson Reuters' CLEAR aggregates public records, utility data, and commercial profiles. Services like DeleteMe can help remove some of your records from commercial databases that feed into government systems.
  • Turn off location services selectively. ICE's Penlink Webloc tracks phones with active location signals. Turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth when you don't need them. Use airplane mode at protests or sensitive locations.
  • Opt out of data sharing. California's DELETE Act lets residents request removal from data broker databases through a single portal. Check whether your state offers similar tools.
  • Know your rights at protests. Recording ICE operations in public is a constitutionally protected activity. Park your car away from the operation to avoid plate scanning. Leave your personal phone at home and use a burner if documenting enforcement actions.

References

  1. Axios: ICE Pays Palantir $30M to Build New Tool to Track and Deport Immigrants (May 1, 2025)
  2. Immigration Policy Tracking Project: Palantir Granted $30 Million to Build ImmigrationOS Surveillance Platform for ICE
  3. ACLU: All the Ways Palantir is Assisting Trump's Abusive Removal Campaign
  4. NPR: ICE Has Spun a Massive Surveillance Web (March 4, 2026)
  5. Fortune: ICE Alleged to Use Palantir-Developed Tool That Uses Medicaid Data to Track Arrest Targets (January 26, 2026)
  6. Migration Policy Institute: Seeking to Ramp Up Deportations, the Trump Administration Quietly Expands a Vast Web of Data
  7. Washington Post: The Powerful Tools in ICE's Arsenal to Track Suspects and Protesters (January 29, 2026)
  8. 404 Media: Inside ICE's Supercharged Facial Recognition App of 200 Million Images
  9. Slate: The Frightening, Very Real Tool ICE Agents Have to Add You to a "Nice Little Database"
  10. American Immigration Council: ICE Uses a Growing Web of AI Services to Power Its Immigration Enforcement and Surveillance
  11. Biometric Update: Class Action Challenges DHS' Use of Facial Recognition Against Protesters
  12. American Immigration Council: Mission Creep: AI Surveillance at DHS Crosses Dangerous Line Into Tracking Americans (April 2026)
  13. The Marshall Project: ICE Protesters Say Feds Retaliate With Investigations
  14. FedScoop: Acting ICE Director Denies Existence of Database Tracking US Citizens
  15. Washington Post: ICE Arsenal Interactive: Biometric Trackers, Cellphone Location Databases and Drones
  16. Brennan Center for Justice: Big Budget Act Creates a "Deportation-Industrial Complex"