ICE Is Paying Palantir $30 Million to Build ‘ImmigrationOS’ Surveillance Platform | EUROtoday

“No other vendor could meet these timeframes of having the infrastructure in place to meet this urgent requirement and deliver a prototype in less than six months,” ICE says within the doc.

ICE’s doc doesn’t specify the info sources Palantir would pull from to energy ImmigrationOS. However, it says that Palantir might “configure” the case administration system that it has offered to ICE since 2014.

Palantir has carried out work at numerous different authorities businesses as early as 2007. Aside from ICE, it has labored with the US Army, Air Force, Navy, Internal Revenue Service, and Federal Bureau of Investigation. As reported by WIRED, Palantir is at present serving to Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) construct a brand-new “mega API” on the IRS that might seek for data throughout all of the completely different databases that the company maintains.

Last week, 404 Media reported {that a} latest model of Palantir’s case-management system for ICE permits brokers to seek for folks primarily based on “hundreds of different, highly specific categories,” together with how an individual entered the nation, their present authorized standing, and their nation of origin. It additionally consists of an individual’s hair and eye coloration, whether or not they have scars or tattoos, and their license-plate reader knowledge, which would supply detailed location knowledge about the place that individual travels by automotive.

These functionalities have been talked about in a authorities privateness evaluation printed in 2016, and it’s not clear what new info might have been built-in into the case administration system over the previous 4 years.

This week’s $30 million award is an addition to an present Palantir contract penned in 2022, initially value about $17 million, for work on ICE’s case administration system. The company has elevated the worth of the contract 5 occasions previous to this month; the most important was a $19 million enhance in September 2023.

The contract’s ImmigrationOS replace was first documented on April 11 in a government-run database monitoring federal spending. The entry had a 248-character description of the change. The five-page doc ICE printed Thursday, in the meantime, has a extra detailed description of Palantir’s anticipated providers for the company.

The contract replace comes because the Trump administration deputizes ICE and different authorities businesses to drastically escalate the ways and scale of deportations from the US. In latest weeks, immigration authorities have arrested and detained folks with scholar visas and inexperienced playing cards, and deported at the least 238 folks to a brutal megaprison in El Salvador, a few of whom haven’t been in a position to converse with a lawyer or have due course of.

As a part of its efforts to push folks to self-deport, DHS in late March revoked the momentary parole of greater than half 1,000,000 folks and demanded that they self-deport in a few month, regardless of having been granted authorization to stay within the US after fleeing harmful or unstable conditions in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela beneath the so-called “CHNV parole programs.”

Last week, the Social Security Administration listed greater than 6,000 of those folks as lifeless, a tactic meant to finish their monetary lives. DHS, in the meantime, despatched emails to an unknown variety of folks declaring that their parole had been revoked and demanding that they self-deport. Several US residents, together with immigration attorneys, obtained the e-mail.

On Monday, a federal decide briefly blocked the Trump administration’s transfer to revoke folks’s authorization to stay within the US beneath the CHNV packages. White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt known as the decide’s ruling “rogue.”