Most of the signs of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown this year have been loud and obvious. Chaotic courthouse confrontations in New York. Masked agents carrying out raids in Chicago. National Guard units quelling protests in Los Angeles.
But immigrant advocates argue that some of the most powerful tools for detentions and deportations are invisible ones, like the new software platform made by private technology company Palantir that will help authorities organize data streams to identify, target and locate immigrants.
On Sept. 25, Palantir was scheduled to deliver a prototype to ICE for a platform called Immigration Lifecycle Operating System, or ImmigrationOS, intended to provide “near real-time visibility” into immigrants movements across the U.S. and enable the prioritization and “streamlining” of immigration enforcement, including monitoring visa overstays and “self-deportation.” The $30 million contract is set to run for two years.
Reporting in WIRED and CNN this spring indicated Palantir, a data analysis firm founded by Alex Karp and Peter Thiel, is involved with efforts led by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to consolidate data sources from across the federal government into a single database. Multiple DOGE employees previously worked for Palantir and Trump advisor Stephen Miller owns tens of thousands of dollars of the company’s stock.
Also Read: ‘Digitizing Pandora’s Box’: Why Civil Liberty Experts Fear DOGE’s Immigrant Database
Citing the technology company’s role in enabling the surveillance of immigrants by federal authorities, activists and immigration advocates have sought to bring Palantir’s elusive digital infrastructure into the public eye, arguing that those opposed to detentions and deportations should challenge the tools that make them possible.
Make the Road New Jersey turned out hundreds of protesters in baby blue T-shirts for a rally last month in Newark, where speakers urged state officials to divest from Palantir. The state’s investment council oversees the investment of state assets, primarily its public employee pension fund — and what it chooses to invest in can sometimes become a political lightning rod. A 2016 law signed by Gov. Chris Christie, for instance, required the state to divest from companies that boycott Israel or Israeli companies.
“When you think about immigration detention and deportation, you think vividly about ICE raids in the streets, horrible videos of mothers in the courthouse, you think about actual detention centers,” Nedia Morsy, executive director of Make the Road New Jersey, told Documented. “We are trying to bring attention to the tech backbone device that’s aggregating data across government systems.”
“If Palantir is able to move forward with ImmigrationOS, all of the information that we have given over — that we’ve trusted the state with — could be used to separate families,” Morsy said.
In terms of recourse, Morsy pointed to a successful national campaign during the first Trump presidency called “Backers of Hate” that directed protests at financial instructions funding private prison companies. Bank of America yielded to public pressure to stop financing companies that operated private prisons in 2019.
Ana Maria Hill, New Jersey state director and vice president of 32BJ SEIU, said 25 members of her labor union, which represents airport workers, janitors, and school cafeteria workers across the state participated in last month’s Make the Road Newark rally because many of their workers live in “vibrant immigrant communities” in New Jersey and have witnessed dramatic immigration raids.
Also Read: The $470 Million Surveillance Program Watching Immigrants Across the U.S.
“If you are Latin American in this country, your family is maybe a mixed status family,” she said. “I have aunts and uncles in my family that are undocumented and they have children. If it’s not happening to you, it’s definitely happening in your bubble.”
Other activists have sought to publicize and condemn Palantir’s work in immigration and national security, including the company’s work for the Israeli Defense Ministry. In mid-July, hundreds of protesters, including tech workers, organized a “Day of Action” with protests outside Palantir’s offices in cities including Denver, Seattle, Washington D.C., New York and Palo Alto, California to demand that the company end contracts with ICE and the Israeli military,
Like the Newark protestors, Jewish Voice for Peace organizers in Seattle similarly called on the Washington State Investment Board this summer to divest the state’s pension funds from its investments in Palantir.
Meanwhile, the legal organization Just Futures Law and the human rights organization Amnesty International are pursuing transparency about the government’s work with Palantir through letters and records requests. Because the full scope of Palantir’s work with ICE, DHS and even DOGE remains unclear, Just Futures Law in August filed records requests for more information about Palantir’s work under the Trump administration, including ImmigrationOS.
Just Futures Law previously filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit in 2019, yielding documents that showed how Homeland Security Investigations agents used Palantir’s technology between 2014 and 2022 to map cell phone data, sort through vast datasets of private and public records and analyze student visa and flight records. With the development of ImmigrationOS and the radically increased government resources allocated to ICE, those abilities are likely to be supercharged.
“We know that Palantir has been integral to things like building profiles on people, to target people for arrest and deportation and to gather all the data and help ICE navigate it in order to carry out workplace raids and family separation,” said Hannah Lucal, a senior policy advisor at Just Futures Law. “Today, we’re seeing more and more protests and actions against Palantir and its leadership, because I think more and more people are coming to understand the for-profit apparatus behind the surveillance dragnet that powers ICE.”
In response to a New York Times story, a Palantir spokesperson denied that it was creating a master database for DOGE, writing on on a company blog in May that, they are instead a “data processor” that provides the tools for customers to use their own data, rather than a data mining or collection business.
Palantir, ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not respond to Documented’s requests for comment.
‘Much more dangerous’
Emerald Tse, an associate at the The Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, said that people are starting to see data privacy as an immigrant justice issue.
“These surveillance technology tools aren’t new, they’re just more powerful than they were before and we’re living in a context where they’re much more dangerous than they were before,” Tse said. “The risks are heightened, but people are also paying attention and looking for ways to shut off data streams and minimize risk to their community.”
Tse said a 2022 report from the Georgetown Law privacy center, re-released this May, showed that ICE and federal agents were using digital surveillance to monitor the lives of the majority of people in the U.S. She said on the state level, civil liberties advocates have started pushing to protect data in state databases from the federal government, including pushing for laws that limit what data is collected and how it can be used.
Some states have signed digital privacy laws that limit the data that companies can collect and banning the sale of sensitive data, with Electronic Privacy Information Center identifying California and Maryland’s laws as some of the nation’s strongest.
However, there are workarounds to state legislation that seek to shield information from immigration agents: the report from Georgetown’s privacy center found that after Oregon lawmakers passed a law preventing state agencies from sharing data with ICE, the state’s DMV agreed to sell license records to data brokers who in turn sell data to ICE.
你知道吗？非公民办理驾照时的这个错误可能会导致选民欺诈
Kathia Quiros, a Las Vegas-based immigration attorney at national firm GWP Immigration Law, was so concerned about Palantir’s growing role in immigration enforcement that she held a Facebook Live Q&A session on the topic in September. After an upbeat theme song introducing her as an immigration attorney, she explained the purpose of ImmigrationOS — and warned viewers that the government can use devices to track real-time locations and monitor social media for discrepancies in their immigration applications.
“More than trying to fight against Palantir, we need to make sure we don’t provide the government with information they can use against us,” Quiros said in an interview with Documented. She suggests immigrants on social media refrain from reposting any images of guns, drugs or violence. In her Facebook live, she also discouraged any posting about politics or controversial topics like the Israel-Palestine conflict.
“Most immigrants are living in fear right now,” she said, regardless of their legal status. “They fear people, but they really need to pay attention to their phones and what their phones represent.”
