ICE seeks expanded LexisNexis investigative data access with Palantir integration

ICE intends to award LexisNexis Risk Solutions a sole-source contract worth an estimated $6.7 million to continue supplying investigative data services to thousands of agency users and feed commercial identity data into ICE applications, including Palantir.

The August 10 notice of intent describes a short-term bridge contract covering a seven-month base period and five one-month options. ICE says only LexisNexis can provide continued access to its LexID identity-resolution technology and Accurint Virtual Crime Center within the time available.

While structured as a bridge contract, the accompanying procurement documents show ICE is seeking considerably more than continued access to a commercial investigative database. The requirements describe an enterprise investigative platform that integrates commercial identity data with agency analytics through APIs, expands identity resolution capabilities and introduces broader AI and facial recognition requirements, pointing to the agency’s longer-term technical direction.

The notice is not an executed contract or a competitive solicitation. Other companies have until August 14 to submit capability statements challenging ICE’s conclusion that LexisNexis is the only responsible source.

A July 22 Performance Work Statement (PWS) was attached to ICE’s August 10 notice for a planned interim Law Enforcement Investigative Database Subscription contract.

A DHS acquisition forecast identifies the procurement as a follow-on to LexisNexis contract 70CMSD21C00000001, which is scheduled to expire August 31.

The PWS is not a modification of that contract but sets out requirements ICE associated with its proposed successor acquisition.

Those requirements show that ICE is seeking considerably more than access to a stand-alone commercial database. The system must connect through application programming interfaces, or APIs, to ICE applications “such as but not limited to” the Palantir platform, PenLink and ICE Data Analytics.

It must also provide a system-to-system connection making public and proprietary data available through individual queries and batch requests.

The requirements would allow ICE personnel and applications to search multiple identifiers, resolve records believed to concern the same person or entity, identify relationships and move results into the agency’s broader analytical and case-management environment.

An enterprise investigative service

ICE wants the platform available around the clock to as many as 11,200 authorized users across Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), the Office of Professional Responsibility and potentially other ICE programs.

The user figure represents accounts distributed among the agents, deportation officers, analysts, targeting personnel, supervisors and internal investigators who conduct or support ICE operations.

The PWS does not disclose how the accounts would be divided or whether every authorized user must be a direct ICE employee.

Users must be able to search identifiers including names, addresses, Social Security numbers, license plates, vehicle identification numbers and aircraft tail numbers. The platform must also support federated searches, entity resolution, relevance scoring, link charts, maps and bulk searches.

The PWS separately requires incarceration and jail booking data for as many as 7,500 ERO users with unlimited searches covering the previous 24 hours, 72 hours or a period selected by the user.

ICE has previously described ERO as having more than 7,700 law enforcement and support personnel, suggesting that the booking service could be available across most of the component rather than limited to a small targeting unit.

ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility would receive tools to search, view and export account profiles, sign-on records, search histories and activity logs, giving the office a means to audit how other personnel use the service.

LexisNexis says LexID draws on more than 82 billion public and proprietary records from over 10,000 sources, assigns a persistent identifier to an individual or business and links records and relationships across databases.

The company cautions that the information may contain errors and should be independently verified.

Accurint Virtual Crime Center adds jail bookings and photographs, mapping, link analysis, device-geolocation analysis and image matching.

The scale of ICE’s previous use suggests that the new access would support routine operations rather than occasional specialized inquiries.

Records obtained by Just Futures Law show that ICE users conducted more than 1.2 million Accurint person searches between March and September 2021. HSI accounted for approximately 500,000 searches and more than 132,000 reports, while ERO had capacity for more than 4,200 users.

The connection to Palantir is not new

The July PWS provides direct evidence that ICE wants LexisNexis data programmatically available to Palantir, but it does not identify the receiving Palantir application or say that the company’s entire database will be copied into it.

The document supports live queries, batch requests and data imports. It does not disclose the transfer frequency, data schemas, retention periods or whether results will be stored permanently in Palantir.

Feeding the data into Palantir is therefore best understood as enabling programmatic access and import, not necessarily transferring all 82 billion records.

The architecture predates the current procurement. ICE’s 2020 LEIDS solicitation required an interface with what it called “FALCON/Raven Palantir systems” and a system-to-system connection combining vendor records with Palantir analytical data to locate people and assets.

The wording blurred two distinct systems during a transition already underway.

FALCON was HSI’s customized version of Palantir Gotham, while RAVEn was an internally developed ICE analytics platform intended to replace it and end the agency’s future sole-source dependence on Gotham.

The solicitation anticipated that a vendor-neutral API would eventually replace the direct Palantir connection, although Palantir continued to support ICE through its separate Investigative Case Management platform.

What has changed is the scale of ICE’s current Palantir environment.

In May, ICE awarded Palantir an $86.27 million order to modernize ERO’s Enforcement Case Management System on a Case Management and Analytics Platform.

In June, the agency issued a separate $45.85 million order for HSI investigative case management and analytics modernization on the same platform.

Both orders were placed under a five-year, departmentwide Palantir blanket purchase agreement with a $1 billion ordering ceiling.

Those HSI and ERO platforms are plausible destinations for LexisNexis queries and results because the data contract serves both components.

The public documents do not establish which one will receive particular data streams. They also do not prove that LexisNexis data will flow directly to ELITE, the Palantir application that can map potential enforcement targets, assemble individual dossiers and display address confidence scores.

AI and facial recognition expand the requirement

The July PWS goes beyond the corresponding 2020 requirements in several important respects.

It calls for an AI-driven identification system that can combine anonymized behavioral indicators, device metadata, network signatures, commercial telemetry and passive environmental markers with known information to infer the identity of an end user.

Another provision requires access to advanced AI-driven facial recognition platforms that can search large image databases and open source media, ingest images in bulk, perform rapid one-to-many comparisons and integrate with existing targeting and case management systems.

The PWS does not identify the identity inference or facial recognition providers, specify which image collections would be searched or establish an accuracy threshold.

The sole-source notice names only LexID and Accurint Virtual Crime Center, leaving unclear whether the AI functions are part of the proposed $6.7 million bridge, requirements for a later contract or capabilities LexisNexis would supply through another product or provider.

The PWS requires human oversight and prohibits using AI output as the sole evidence for a punitive or enforcement action. The contractor must document data flows and model provenance, maintain logs and monitor for bias or declining performance.

Those clauses describe what a contractor would be required to do. They do not establish that ICE has deployed or independently evaluated the proposed systems.

The PWS also anticipates that a privacy lead may have to help prepare or update a Privacy Threshold Analysis, Privacy Impact Assessment or System of Records Notice.

No public ICE privacy assessment located during a review of the program specifically addresses the expanded facial recognition and behavioral identity functions.

The procurement documents do not align

The bridge would follow ICE’s current LexisNexis contract, 70CMSD21C00000001, awarded in February 2021 and scheduled to end August 31. Federal records show approximately $24.51 million in obligations and ceiling value. A 2021 modification added incarceration and real-time jail-booking data.

The records surrounding the successor requirement are inconsistent. A Department of Homeland Security acquisition forecast published August 6 described a six-month base period followed by six monthly options and estimated the contract at between $2 million and $5 million.

Four days later, ICE’s notice changed the structure to a seven-month base and five monthly options and put the estimated value at $6.7 million. Both formulations cover a maximum of one year and appear intended to bridge the period following expiration of the incumbent contract.

The July PWS instead states that performance will consist of a base year and four one-year options, potentially extending the requirement for five years. Its contract number field remains the placeholder 70CMSD26CXXXXXXX, and it contains no price schedule.

ICE may have attached a broader long-term requirement to its short-term notice, or the PWS may not have been conformed to the bridge terms. Until an award is posted, the seven-month base and five one-month options in the August 10 notice are ICE’s latest public description of the intended purchase.

What the documents establish more clearly is the program’s technical direction. ICE intends to preserve enterprise access to LexisNexis data while expanding the means by which that information can be queried, combined and transferred into Palantir and other analytical systems.

The contract would continue an existing data pipeline, but place it within a substantially larger Palantir environment and a requirement that now reaches into behavioral identity inference and facial recognition.

Article Topics

behavioral analysis  |  facial recognition  |  ICE - U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement  |  identity management  |  LexisNexis  |  Palantir  |  procurement  |  U.S. Government