Palantir’s ImmigrationOS fuels Trump administration’s immigrant removal agenda

In April 2025, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) awarded a $30 million contract to Palantir Technologies to develop ImmigrationOS, a comprehensive digital platform aimed at streamlining and expanding the agency’s deportation apparatus. It marked a deepening of Palantir’s longstanding role in immigration enforcement which stretches back more than a decade to when it first supplied data integration tools to ICE in 2014.

What began as an intelligence partnership has now evolved into an expansive technological infrastructure powering what could be the most aggressive mass deportation campaign in modern American history. During his 2024 campaign, President Trump pledged to deport between 13 and 20 million undocumented immigrants in what he said would be “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”

To date, however, the Trump administration has not deported anywhere near the numbers Trump declared he would. While the administration has intensified immigration enforcement efforts, logistical, legal, and political challenges have hindered the realization of his ambitious deportation goals.​ In the first 50 days of Trump’s second term, ICE reported over 32,000 arrests which represented an uptick in enforcement, but still not approaching the millions of deportations that Trump promised. ​

ImmigrationOS is an end-to-end digital ecosystem that automates the lifecycle of deportation. Its architecture is built to optimize three primary enforcement areas. First, the system prioritizes targets using AI to sift through immigration records, criminal histories, and social indicators such as known affiliations or prior infractions.

Second, it provides near real-time monitoring of “self-deportation” events, enabling ICE to track individuals who exit the United States voluntarily, often under pressure. Third, it supports what the agency refers to as “immigration lifecycle management,” which includes coordinating logistics for detentions, removals, and administrative follow-through to minimize operational delays.

At the center of this platform is the integration of data from an extraordinary range of sources. ImmigrationOS pulls from the Social Security Administration (SSA), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and state voter rolls, among others. But it doesn’t stop there. Leaked documents obtained by 404 Media revealed that ICE is also working to incorporate data from agencies typically unrelated to immigration enforcement.

Additionally, there are allegations that data for ImmigrationOS is being sourced through unauthorized access to government databases, facilitated by individuals with high-level access. This has led to concerns about the legality and ethics of the data collection methods that are being employed.

Another ICE system known as Alien Tracker (ATrac) operates in tandem with ImmigrationOS and reveals the scale and ambition of the ICE’s surveillance infrastructure. ATrac features a geospatial interface that displays potential targets by location and assigns field teams to apprehend them. These teams report their outcomes into the system – whether the target was arrested, located but not detained, or never found.

ATrac integrates data from multiple federal agencies, including SSA, USCIS, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and U.S. Marshals Service. ICE plans to further expand ATrac’s data sources to include information from the Department of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The aggregation of this data is channeled into a central enforcement platform that is designed to identify, track, and remove individuals deemed deportable. The inclusion of biometric and behavioral data, along with social identifiers collected through third-party sources like Thomson Reuters Special Services allows for a continuously updating portrait of immigration enforcement priorities.

While the specific developer of ATrac has not been publicly disclosed, the system is accessed through ICE’s in-house platform known as the Repository for Analytics in a Virtualized Environment (RAVEn). RAVEn was developed by ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations. After initial challenges with RAVEn, ICE collaborated with Palantir to develop ImmigrationOS.

According to leaked internal communications, RAVEn failed to meet expectations and was abandoned in late 2024 in favor of a return to Palantir’s services. RAVEn is now reportedly being used primarily to access tools like ATrac and to perform large-scale analytical projects, reinforcing Palantir’s central role in day-to-day enforcement operations.

According to internal messages leaked to 404 Media, the company is actively assisting ICE in this effort by producing location intelligence for deportation targets and refining enforcement workflows. Palantir’s Chief Technology Officer Akash Jain confirmed in an internal Slack message that teams had recently completed a set of new data integrations and were prototyping additional workflows tailored to ICE’s evolving operational needs. These updates occurred over a three-week period and have since evolved into a six-month long project.

While Palantir’s executives have maintained that their technology supports national security objectives, public scrutiny has intensified. The leaked messages show that company leadership anticipated a public backlash and proactively drafted talking points to help employees field uncomfortable questions. These FAQs were designed to present Palantir’s work as apolitical and focused solely on public safety, despite the system’s direct alignment with Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

At the core of the controversy is the role of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the opaque federal entity led by Elon Musk. DOGE has become a data clearinghouse by siphoning sensitive records from across the federal government – often without clear statutory authority – and supplying it to enforcement programs like ImmigrationOS. Musk and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel have a longstanding relationship rooted in their early ventures in Silicon Valley, particularly through their roles in the creation of PayPal.

According to whistleblower reports cited by House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Committee Ranking Member Rep. Gerry Connolly, DOGE is building a “cross-agency master database” of sensitive personal information using Social Security records, IRS filings, Medicare data, biometric identifiers, and even voting histories. This trove of data feeds directly into ICE’s operational platforms, reportedly bypassing standard cybersecurity protocols and in violation of privacy laws. Last week, Connolly formally requested an investigation by SSA’s Inspector General to assess the legality and implications of DOGE’s actions.

“Based on the whistleblower information reported to the committee, I have three primary concerns about how the Trump administration and DOGE are putting SSA benefits and Americans’ sensitive data at risk, particularly given the exceptionally careless approach that individuals associated with DOGE have shown thus far in managing federal information technology systems and handling sensitive data,” Connolly said in his letter to Michelle L. Anderson, Assistant Inspector General for Audit Performing the Duties of the Inspector General.

“Information obtained by the committee …  indicates that DOGE is carrying out its work in a manner that disregards important cybersecurity and privacy considerations, potentially in violation of the law,” Connolly said. “Information obtained by the committee also indicates that individuals associated with DOGE have assembled backpacks full of laptops, each with access to different agency systems, that DOGE staff is using to combine databases that are currently maintained separately by multiple federal agencies.”

The blurred boundaries between data collected for civic administration and its use by law enforcement present serious ethical concerns. Civil liberties groups warn that these integrations normalize the use of welfare and administrative records for punitive ends and establishes a precedent in which benefits systems double as enforcement tools. Critics argue that this opens the door to profiling, selective enforcement, and the possibility of targeting individuals based on race, political activism, or religious affiliation, especially when the underlying intelligence systems are opaque and largely shielded from public accountability.

Immigration lawyers have also expressed concerns about violations of due process. In several reported cases, individuals have been detained or deported without ever being informed of the evidence used to locate or target them. Because systems like ImmigrationOS and ATrac rely on algorithmic scoring and fused intelligence streams, the data trail leading to an enforcement decision is often too complex or classified to challenge in court.

This lack of transparency threatens core legal protections and shifts significant discretion away from judges and into the hands of data scientists and software platforms operating within ICE and its contractors. The Trump administration’s plans have effectively repositioned immigration enforcement as a data science problem. Rather than expanding immigration courts or legal resources, the emphasis has shifted toward analytics, predictive modeling, and automation.

The human cost of these initiatives is becoming more visible. Stories are emerging of individuals who voluntarily checked in with ICE or updated their information through government apps, only to be detained unexpectedly based on algorithmically generated leads.

Critics argue that this undermines the good faith and compliance incentives that have historically formed the foundation of voluntary immigration programs. It also has the chilling effect of dissuading immigrants from accessing healthcare, public housing, or educational benefits, further entrenching inequality and fear.

As alarms continue to ring, the question remains whether meaningful oversight or legislative restraint can be brought to bear on ImmigrationOS and its data ecosystem. The scale of integration between Palantir, ICE, and DOGE represents a seismic shift in how immigration is policed in the United States. At the same time, it poses a test for democratic governance, one that forces the country to reckon with whether the pursuit of operational efficiency can justify a system that treats individuals as data points rather than people entitled to rights and protections.

Palantir’s defenders argue that the company is merely a contractor providing tools, not setting policy. But as the operational backbone of Trump’s deportation machine, ImmigrationOS stands as a stark example of how private technology firms are reshaping the extent and reach of government power.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  DHS  |  Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART)  |  ICE  |  immigration  |  ImmigrationOS  |  Palantir  |  U  |  U.S. Government