2 weeks Ago By Brandon Vigliarolo
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has an urgent need for a new software system to help implement the Trump administration's deportation plans, and it's turning to longtime ICE supplier Palantir for a rush build job. News of the $29.9 million deal came last week in a contract justification letter [PDF] from ICE.
The letter argued that the deal had to be awarded quickly, with no opportunity for competing bids, because the immigration agency wants a prototype ready by September 25 - a rapid turnaround. Palantir is the only vendor that can deliver on that timeline, the letter argued. It is expected to merge together various data sources to provide an easy interface for selecting foreigners to remove from the country, among other things.
"Palantir's systems are already ingesting and processing data from multiple ICE, DHS [Dept of Homeland Security] and external sources," ICE said in its filing. "Palantir is the only source that can provide the required capabilities and prototype ..
. without causing unacceptable delays." The new system, ICE Immigration Lifecycle Operating System, or ImmigrationOS, is being built to give the agency two particular capabilities that it said current software systems lack.
First, ImmigrationOS will help with "targeting and enforcement prioritization" by "streamlining selection and apprehension operations" based on ICE priorities, such as apprehending suspected or proven members of criminal gangs, violent offenders, and folks who overstay their visas. ImmigrationOS is also supposed to provide "real-time visibility into instances of self-deportation" - that is, immigrants who leave before they're kicked out - and end-to-end immigration lifecycle tracking, which seems from ICE's description to be less about tracking legal immigrants working through the system and more about the "immigration lifecycle from identification to removal." That, the acquisition paperwork points out, will help ICE make deportations more efficient, "minimizing time and resource expenditure.
" Palantir, which is named after the all-seeing crystal balls in the Lord of the Rings, has provided support for Immigration enforcers for more than a decade, the letter notes, and its thorough integration into ICE systems means the six-month deadline for ImmigrationOS to reach the prototype phase should be a snap for the firm. The Colorado-based biz was co-founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, a Republican mega-donor who bankrolled the political rise of JD Vance, his protégé and now US Vice President. The ImmigrationOS contract puts Palantir front-and-center in the drama over Trump's grab-first-ask-questions-later-maybe immigration policy, and sparked some catty back-and-forth between frequent tech pontificator Paul Graham, who co-founded startup factory Y Combinator, and the folks at Palantir.
Graham quipped on X, "there are a huge number of other places you can go work rather than at the company building the infrastructure of the police state." In response, Palantir's head of commercial technologies, Ted Mabrey, wrote a long response comparing Graham's stance to the way Google acted in 2018 when it walked away from the Pentagon's Project Maven after some employees expressed outrage at helping the military use AI to target people more effectively. If you join Palantir, Mabrey wrote, "you should expect to weather attacks like this all the time; from all sides of the political aisle.
" He added, "The only way to counter these bullies is not to argue but to build." The Trump administration has run into a firestorm of criticism over the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia , whom Trump has refused to return to America despite orders from the US Supreme Court. The regime has also been criticized for detaining and intending to deport a number of foreign pro-Palestinian students studying in the US legally who spoke out about the Israel-Hamas war.
We've reached out to both ICE and Palantir to learn whether ImmigrationOS would include built-in protections to prevent the apprehension of legal law-abiding immigrants, and haven't heard back. ®.
