Palantir Is Profiting from Trump’s Ravenous Appetite for Deportations
April 18, 2025
Palantir, the data analytics giant, has deepened its collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in support of the Trump administration’s escalating deportation campaign. This development comes amid mounting instances of the administration trampling due process and other fundamental rights in its immigration enforcement operations.
Palantir’s relationship with ICE is not new. The two have partnered since at least 2014, when the Obama administration awarded the company a $41 million contract to build and maintain an intelligence system known as Investigative Case Management (ICM), designed to track the personal and criminal records of both legal and undocumented immigrants. That work continued under the first Trump and Biden administrations alike. In September 2022, Palantir renewed its contract with ICE—this time valued at around $90 million—for another five years. As of last week, that contract was expanded by tens of millions of dollars and updated to enable “complete target analysis of known populations.”
Internal communications obtained by 404 Media offer further insight into the scale and intensity of Palantir’s ramp-up. In one Slack message, Akash Jain, Chief Technology Officer of Palantir Technologies and President of Palantir USG, wrote: “Over the last few weeks we prototyped a new set of data integrations and workflows with ICE” and added: “The new administration’s focus on leveraging data to drive enforcement operations has accelerated those efforts.”
404 Media reports further:
“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.”
“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.”
In ordinary times, the use of data analytics to support immigration enforcement could be viewed as a legitimate function of government. But Palantir’s role in generating leads for deportation and managing the logistics of Trump’s operation comes at a moment when that operation is increasingly marked by lawlessness and cruelty. In recent weeks, the administration has detained a foreign student for deportation despite the State Department finding no link to antisemitism or Hamas, as was alleged. It has rounded up planeloads of Venezuelan migrants supposedly connected to the criminal group Tren de Aragua and sent them to a mega prison in El Salvador without due process. It has refused to help return a man mistakenly sent to that same prison. And it has even called for deporting U.S. citizens to El Salvador. In supporting the Trump administration’s deportation apparatus, Palantir is complicit in those human rights and constitutional violations.
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