‘Domestic Terrorism’: ICE Contractor Palantir’s Tools for Tracking Dissent
Peter Thiel’s data firm researched protest prediction for the US Army before agreeing to build ICE’s data platform to conduct mass deportation. Are its tools now targeting democratic dissent?
The Trump administration’s immigration and customs enforcement agency, ICE – which sparked outrage after killing US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on the grounds of them being “domestic terrorists” – is using digital surveillance for its mass deportation scheme built by the data firm Palantir, which previously developed tools to track protestors for the US Army, Byline Times can reveal.
Palantir, the giant US analytics firm co-founded by pro-Trump billionaire Peter Thiel, has major contracts with the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care, and the Ministry of Defence.
The company has a £330 million contract as the lead supplier of the NHS’ federated data programme, and a £240 million contract to provide analytics for the MoD. London is home to the company’s biggest office outside of the United States.
In the US, the company’s contracts with ICE stretch across a number of years, with obligations already exceeding $139 million and procurement documents describing future work worth hundreds of millions more in its mission to track down illegal migrants as part of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy.
Both killings in the past month have been of protestors against ICE activity.
Good, a 37-year-old American citizen and mother of three, was fatally shot three times by ICE agent Jonathan Ross after she monitored his activities. Witnesses reported that agents gave conflicting commands – one told her to move her vehicle, while another shouted for her to exit.
Pretti, also 37, an intensive care unit nurse at a specialised medical centre operated by the US Department of Veterans Affairs, was holding his phone to film the activities of ICE officers and was trying to protect a woman who had been pepper-sprayed when he was shot on his knees in the back of the head.
It has since emerged that ICE agents reportedly had prior contact with Pretti a week earlier when he was protesting against ICE efforts to detain others. On that occasion, ICE attacked him and broke his ribs.
Sources told CNN that ICE officers have been collecting private information about protestors in Minneapolis and that the agency had “documented details” about Pretti before he was shot to death – raising the question of what information ICE is compiling about protestors.
The US Department of Homeland Security – of which ICE is the largest investigative arm – has denied creating a “database” of “domestic terrorists” or of having any record of the previous incident involving Pretti.
But analysis by Byline Times of official ICE procurement documents shows it has the capability to move from immigration enforcement to the suppression of protest – with Palantir first developing such technology for the Pentagon.
Domestic Surveillance
Two years into the first Trump administration, the Pentagon was revealed to be funding research to predict where anti-Trump protests would occur.
This work, led by the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL), involved scraping social media, tracking geolocation data, mapping social networks to identify influencers and organisers, crowd dynamics modelling, and building AI models to forecast dissent before it emerged.
One of the scientists behind the research, Lance Kaplan, working at the ARL, also published papers on the use of sensor fusion and network science to predict human behaviour from data streams. Another, Claire Bonial, listed research interests including “predicting social unrest using social media”, “event detection”, and “modelling emergent behaviour”.
In 2018, Palantir began working directly with the US Army Research Laboratory.
In 2020, the company was awarded a $91 million contract for “artificial intelligence and machine learning development”.
In 2021, the US Army claimed that ARL scientists had built models to “detect events from open-source information” and “identify patterns before events fully emerge”.
Larger contracts for Palantir followed.
In July 2022, it was awarded $99.9 million to “scale capabilities across defence users”. In September 2022, it was awarded up to $229 million more, taking AI experiments from a lab into the US Department of Defence.
Soon, the highly militarised capabilities developed by Palantir and the US Army Research Laboratory were expanding – and linked to ICE.
Immigration Tracking
While the Pentagon was building a militarised surveillance apparatus capable of tracking protest activity in real time, the Trump administration made it easier to deploy soldiers against American civilians.
The doctrine around the 1807 Insurrection Act – the emergency provision that allows a president to send the US Army into American streets – was revised to lower the threshold for military intervention in domestic affairs.
This change allowed homeland agencies to access classified Pentagon intelligence in the context of “domestic emergencies” – providing ICE with unprecedented access to data on Americans held by federal government agencies.
By April 2025, Wired and other outlets reported that ICE was paying Palantir approximately $30 million to build “ImmigrationOS” – marketed as an “immigration lifecycle operating system” to streamline deportations, from the identification of deportees to their removal.
Documents obtained through Freedom of Information requests by the Electronic Privacy Information Centre in Washington DC show that the Palantir ecosystem includes an “interface hub” that controls how information moves between ICE’s ‘case management’ to a data warehouse for cross-agency sharing, and a telecommunications storage system that holds call records and intercept data obtained through subpoenas.
This is a data ingestion machine designed to pull information from multiple sources, link it all up automatically, analyse it in real time, and make it actionable for ICE officers.
Donald Trump’s second run at the White House promised a mass deportation scheme that would rid the United States of its undocumented migrants. In office, it is a policy that is being implemented to brutal effect – and one that Palantir is at the centre of.
In January, ICE announced that it was awarding Peter Thiel’s firm $34 million for a sole-source contract for the next generation of its “investigative case management” system of detections, arrests, and deportations.
It said that only Palantir could build “the official system of record for ICE investigative cases” as “a unified single integrated platform that supports both investigative case management and investigative analytics”.
The system must store data in an “enterprise lakehouse repository” – one giant pool merging ICE case files with “data from other law enforcement agencies”, integrating it with the FBI’s criminal justice information services, the Office of Biometric Identity Management (fingerprints and facial recognition), and the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System.
The Surveillance State
ICE’s “investigative case management” architecture – linking immigration enforcement, criminal databases, biometric identification, telecommunications monitoring, and border control into one searchable, analysable, alert-generating machine – has the potential to be a domestic surveillance machine.
In 2018, the research goals of the US Army Research Laboratory were to monitor open-source information to detect emerging events, map social networks to identify organisers and influencers, predict where gatherings would occur, model crowd behaviour, and ultimately triangulate these millions of data points to be able to track, identify, and locate protestors with granular detail.
Palantir embedded itself in that research as the AI infrastructure provider. It then won contracts worth hundreds of millions to scale those capabilities across the military. And almost simultaneously, Palantir began building ICE’s surveillance capabilities and is now the sole-source contractor running its investigative backbone.
ICE’s platform requirements are virtually identical to those developed by Palantir at the US Army Research Laboratory: to integrate data from multiple agencies into one searchable pool; use analytics to surface connections between people, locations, and events; identify and prioritise subjects automatically; and generate alerts that propagate to border enforcement.
Despite Donald Trump’s pause to ICE enforcement in Minneapolis in response to the backlash – including from within the Republican Party – against the murder of Alex Pretti, it remains the case that Palantir has helped build a military-grade domestic surveillance architecture that can be used to target both undocumented migrants and those who protest against the President’s policies.
Written by
Nafeez Ahmed is Byline Times’ Head of Investigations
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How sick are our governments? Thatcher: there is no such thing as society. They did their level best to destroy it for sure. Follow the money.