The Police State, Powered by Palantir

Last week, the news outlet 404 Media reported on leaked documents showing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is paying tech software giant Palantir tens of millions of dollars to upgrade its software services. The updates indicate that President Donald Trump is preparing to accelerate the mass deportation agenda he announced during his inaugural address with a pledge to send “millions and millions” of immigrants back to their home countries. 

The documents reveal that Palantir is intensifying its relationship to ICE, “including finding the physical location of people who are marked for deportation.” Once people are tracked down, no place will be safe, since the administration has ended a policy that restricted ICE arrests at sensitive locations such as schools, hospitals and sites of religious worship. Another new solution, Immigration Lifecycle Operating System — or ImmigrationOS — seeks to improve enforcement efficiency and provide “near real-time visibility into instances of self-deportation.” The upgraded services also include Palantir’s Investigative Case Management System to enhance “complete target analysis of known populations” and “update the tool’s targeting and enforcement priorities.”

The ICM case management system is at the core of Palantir’s services to ICE. Created in 2014, ICM brings together data from “separate silos,” including those hosted by other agencies, such as the CIA, FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. This is standard practice in the tech industry, a product of advances in technology such as cloud computing (to pool vast databases of data) and so-called “artificial intelligence” (to make sense of the big data repositories). Microsoft, for example, assembled its flagship policing platform, Microsoft Aware (also known as the Microsoft Domain Awareness System), for the New York Police Department to integrate information from a variety of databases for indexing, analytics, monitoring and investigations. From there, Microsoft modified its platform to service prisons via its Digital Prison Management Solution.

Palantir does more or less the same thing: centralize databases into a single platform and perform big data analytics. The company was created to service the U.S. intelligence community, with early funding from the CIA’s venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel. As it succeeded, it expanded its offerings for police, militaries, intelligence agencies, health care providers and more. Now the surveillance giant is worth $220 billion, thanks in large part to government contracts, which provide the majority of its revenue. Platforms like the ICM and Microsoft’s Aware are large, complex applications that are expensive to build, install and maintain, so they need clients like governments with deep pockets.

Birds of a feather flock together, and Palantir’s leading founders, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, are unabashed right-wing ultranationalists, making them a natural fit for the Trump administration. Unlike many of Silicon Valley’s leading icons, Thiel was an open supporter of Trump during his first campaign, and the corporation reached record lobbying expenditures in 2024, marking it as a “Trump trade” for investors. According to the Campaign for Accountability, there is an extensive revolving door between Washington and Palantir, which has hired officials from the White House, CIA, Congress and Pentagon to work for the company.

It isn’t just undocumented migrants who are at risk. The administration has already revoked the visas of nearly 1,700 students and recent graduates, many of them for supporting Palestine or committing minor infractions. Palantir’s surveillance platform can also target U.S. citizens that the Trump administration may attempt to send to El Salvador, using executive orders to bypass civil rights and liberties. Many human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, Mijente and the Immigrant Defense Project, have condemned these moves and Palantir’s record, but taken together, civil rights and liberties organizations have mixed recommendations for solutions and tend toward reforming systems produced by the likes of Palantir — e.g. through transparency and legal restrictions on surveillance practices — rather than forming a unified demand to abolish the digital police state.

Palantir is no stranger to popular backlash. In 2018, social justice advocacy group Mijente put Palantir in the spotlight through its #NoTechForICE campaign. In response to criticism over the current contract, Ted Mabrey, head of Palantir Commercial, has suggested that the company will continue building technologies for carceral, military and intelligence agencies. He noted that Google — which once withdrew its work on drone analytics for the U.S. military’s Project Maven — has become more open to resuming such work, suggesting that current backlash is a temporary phenomenon.

For those concerned with the state of civil rights and liberties, advances in surveillance technologies should be of paramount concern. While it’s possible the latest news will spark a new campaign, Palantir and other tech giants are continuing to advance the 21^st century police state.