Palantir's App Hunts Migrants, and Nobody Ever Vetted It

A new Palantir app showed up on the government-issued phones of ICE deportation officers over the winter, during the intensified immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. ELITE searches records from government agencies and other sources, builds files on the people it selects and compiles them into lists. It plots where a person is located on a map. For every match, it provides a confidence score, a number meant to show how certain the information about that person is supposed to be. Suspicion gets a decimal point and goes straight into a pocket.

Palantir is considered a company backed by the CIA, the U.S. foreign intelligence agency, and it uses artificial intelligence for everything from the business of war to predictive policing. ELITE stands for Enhanced Lead Identification and Targeting. The application pulls its information from 12 different sources, sensitive records on immigrants as well as American citizens, from home addresses to criminal records.

Its arrival coincided with a hiring wave. ICE took on more than 12,000 employees under President Donald Trump in a short period of time, and badges and guns were handed out at record speed, made possible by shortened training. The curriculum was cut back so the ranks could be filled faster; the badge often came before the exam had been passed. Thousands of these new hires were out on the streets before their background checks had been completed, as consistent reports from the beginning of the year show. Unvetted people with a surveillance tool in their hands create a danger to civil rights and national security, according to whistleblowers inside the agency and former Department of Homeland Security officials. One deportation officer from the hiring wave, who fears for his livelihood, said: "Some of them should never have been hired, let alone been given access to ELITE."

Mary Ellen Callahan, former chief of staff to the deputy leadership of the Department of Homeland Security and once the department's top privacy official, considers this a break with every previous practice. Nobody should have been hired before the checks were completed, she said, and that had never happened under previous administrations. Giving newly hired people access to sensitive databases like ELITE before they had been vetted endangered public safety because unvetted personnel could misuse the information. ELITE never went through the standard process that is supposed to protect such tools from abuse and safeguard rights.

ELITE is sitting ready on every government-issued phone used by a deportation officer, according to 5 officers from different regions. You can open the application without having passed the background check, one of them said; it is one of the first programs given to new personnel so they can actually get started. Unvetted officers continue working across all of their assigned areas, some of them hired nearly a year ago. Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor Palantir responded to requests for comment. A number promises certainty, and certainty is what an unvetted officer reaches for fastest. A program that presses uncertainty into a clean number takes the work out of doubt before anyone even knocks on the door. What the machine sorts incorrectly, the person with the gun carries out.

A 2002 law requires the government to prepare and publish a privacy impact assessment for every new technology that collects or shares personal data, as a Justice Department summary states. The process is meant to disclose how a technology intrudes into the lives of those affected and who is accountable for abuse. According to the Department of Homeland Security's own documents, ELITE processes exactly that kind of data, but no assessment has been published for it. The department's privacy office produced only 1 during the entire year, Callahan said; she herself had submitted 228 in 3.5 years. The government that wants to see everything about everyone is withholding its own accountability.

On its overview of its own applications, the Department of Homeland Security does list an assessment for ELITE, but the link leads nowhere relevant. It ends at a 2019 paper on the Enforcement Integrated Database, one of many systems from which ELITE assembles its pictures of people. Clare Garvie, a privacy lawyer and deputy director for technology policy at the Policing Project at New York University, says this is not a formality. The paper predates the application and describes neither its data sources nor the conclusions it draws about people. Such assessments are how the public learns what is being collected about them and who is allowed to access it. If ICE does not even meet this basic requirement, she said, she has no confidence that the agency is using the tool lawfully in the field.

Concern about machine-driven surveillance by security agencies is growing, and ICE is now itself using artificial intelligence to fight the exposure of its own personnel online. One officer familiar with ELITE summed it up in a single line: "I know this sounds crazy, but this is 1984." Today the application targets undocumented immigrants, he said, but it could easily be turned on Americans. A tool that starts at the border does not stop there.