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Over the past decade, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) has amassed millions of data points that it uses to identify and track its targets – from social media posts to location history and, most recently, tax information. There’s been one multibillion-dollar tech company particularly instrumental in enabling ICE to put all that data to work: Palantir, the data analytics firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, the rightwing mega-donor and tech investor.
A cache of internal ICE documents offer some of the first real-world examples of how ICE has used Palantir in its investigations and during on-the-ground enforcement operations. The documents largely cover Palantir’s contract with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the investigative arm of ICE that is responsible for stopping the “illegal movement of people, goods, money, contraband, weapons and sensitive technology”.
The documents span the period of 2014 to 2022, illustrating Palantir’s work with both Democratic and Republican administrations. But experts say the insights are especially alarming in light of the second Trump administration’s unprecedented investment in ICE. They show the HSI team used Palantir platforms and apps to track air travel, analyze information like driver’s license scans and track people’s locations using cell phone records.
One of the most revealing elements of the documents relates to Falcon, a desktop and mobile app Palantir custom-built for ICE. Ice stopped using Falcon in 2022 in favor of an HSI-built tool called Raven. ICE agents used Falcon to help run on-the-ground operations and report back. The app allowed agents to track their own teammates’ and subjects’ locations, and record and share real-time information from in-person encounters such as field interviews or scans of people’s licenses.
Agents could use Falcon to search for people’s names, known locations, vehicles or passport information against Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal databases like the Enforcement Integrated Database (EID) – a vast database that holds biometric and personal information on anyone who has been encountered or arrested, detained or deported by any DHS agency – on the go.
In addition to collecting and analyzing field interviews, the agents used Falcon for “blueforce tracking”, a military term for tracking someone’s GPS location. Documents show ICE agents could also use Falcon to track a person’s location, including their “route and movement”, hour by hour using cell phone tower records.
The documents also reveal the breadth of information that Palantir enabled Ice to access, allowing them to track people across multiple databases, at times at the request of other government agencies.
Both the Falcon app and another Palantir-built platform, Investigative Case Management (ICM), enabled ICE to access a network of federally and privately owned databases of people’s information. ICE agents were encouraged to upload as much data as possible from field operations into Falcon and to share it with other ICE officials.
Emails also show ICE used Palantir products to track individuals across various databases at the behest of other agencies. In emails from June 2020, an agent in an HSI office in Arkansas asked for technical support tracking whether someone being investigated by another government agency had boarded a flight. The emails show the agents expected to be able to search for this individual across two DHS databases: the Advance Passenger Information System (Apis), which includes “pre-arrival and departure manifest data on all passengers and crew members”, and a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) border crossing database that tracks people, cargo and vehicles crossing through US ports of entry and exit.
ICE agents were also encouraged to import information from databases not connected to the Palantir tools, including subscription-based services like the investigative platform Thomson Reuters Clear, which collects information from data brokers like Equifax; news articles and social media posts; CBP border crossing data; and local, state, national and international law enforcement offices including the FBI’s National Crime Information Center.
Data collected in the ICM platform was, in some cases, made accessible to agents in other parts of ICE, including units within CBP, the Transportation Security Administration and the US Coast Guard. A unit of immigration officers charged with arrests and removals, known as Enforcement and Removal Operations, or ERO, was also in some cases given access to Palantir platforms.
Experts warn that, in light of the Trump administration’s threats to crack down on “far-left” groups, the scope of application for Palantir’s tools could only grow. Already, a new report from the Intercept revealed HSI subpoenaed and received information from Google about international students who were being investigated over their pro-Palestinian activism.
“Now [with access to more federal databases] ICE can use this type of surveillance apparatus on anyone – not only anyone who is undocumented but anyone who this administration wants to criminalize and anyone who the administration wants to put under surveillance,” said MediaJustice: “Time and time again, you’re seeing ICE act in ways that are incredibly violent and aggressive. It does have a chilling effect. When you know they have a technology that can track relationships, your conversations, and your organizing activity, that can be a silencing force.”
© 2015 Mutual Fund Observer. All rights reserved.
© 2015 Mutual Fund Observer. All rights reserved. Powered by Vanilla
Comments
Ironically, China must relinquish control of Tik Tok so that the U.S. can preserve some measure of national security, and yet that ship has already sailed thanks to Palantir.