Palantir Said It Had Nothing to Do With ICE Deportations. New Documents Seem to Tell a Different Story.

By APRIL GLASER
MAY 02, 2019 8:55 PM

Palantir Technologies, the $20 billion data-analytics firm founded by Peter Thiel with the help of $2 million from the CIA’s venture capital firm, has never been shy about its work with governments and law enforcement. But in December, when it was reported that the company renewed a $38 million contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Palantir sent a statement to the New York Times that appeared to distance the company from the Trump administration’s detention, deportation, and family-separation policies. Palantir stressed that it works with the Homeland Security Investigations unit of ICE, not Enforcement and Removal Operations, which “is responsible for interior civil immigration enforcement, including deportation and detention of undocumented immigrants,” the statement read. “We do not work for E.R.O.”

That might be the case, but a close read of recently released ICE documents reveals that Palantir has been far more involved with the detention and deportation functions than previously implied. The May 2017 documents, which were obtained through Freedom of Information Act litigation led by the American Immigration Council in partnership with other immigrant rights groups and published last week in the Intercept, come from the Homeland Security Investigations unit. One particular seven-page report, titled “Unaccompanied Alien Children Human Smuggling Disruption Initiative,” explains the formation of a 90- to 120-day program targeting smugglers who help unaccompanied minors cross the border into the United States. The document outlines a plan for “identification, investigation, and arrest of human smuggling facilitators, including, but not limited to, parents and family members.”

Once an unaccompanied minor is located by an ICE investigation agent, the document instructs the agent to log the “arrival in the Investigative Case Management (ICM) system.” The advocacy group Mijiente, which has been tracking Palantir and other tech companies’ ties to ICE, found the name of the Palantir software in the document, which it described in a blog post Thursday. ICM is a system built by Palantir, funded initially by a $41 million contract with ICE in 2014. With the ICM system, immigration agents are provided access to intelligence from the Drug Enforcement Agency, the FBI, and other law enforcement agencies, in addition to information like a subject’s criminal record and work history.

“When an unaccompanied minor comes to the U.S. and goes to a shelter, various departments help find a sponsor for the child to take them out of custody and allow them to do be united with their families,”Mijente’s Jacinta Gonzalez told me in an interview. Previously, immigrants would be able to come forward and claim their child, be reunited, and then go through the immigration process. But under the program listed in the documents, ICE appears to have been conducting background checks on parents claiming children. This, according to Gonzalez, deters family members from claiming children, which has caused them to be detained for longer periods of time. “What these documents show is that as ICE was starting this program to try to prosecute and arrest people, and the key place where that information was stored and communicated to be able to prosecute them was through the ICM and Palantir’s information sharing,” says Gonzalez.

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