Palantir Built ICE's Surveillance Machine — And Its Executives Are Funding Rep. Auchincloss

January 30, 2026

Palantir Technologies has received nearly a billion dollars in federal contracts over the past year to build the surveillance infrastructure that powers ICE’s enforcement operations.¹ Its tools pull data from across government agencies — Medicaid records, Social Security files, tax data, student visa records, license plate readers — and consolidate them into searchable platforms that ICE agents use to identify, locate, and deport people.²³ According to FEC filings, Palantir’s top executives — including CEO Alexander Karp, CFO David Glazer, and Executive Vice President Josh Harris — have contributed $25,350 to Rep. Auchincloss’s campaign in the current cycle.⁴

The Tools Palantir Built for ICE

Palantir’s relationship with ICE dates back over a decade. The company has built several interconnected systems that form the backbone of ICE’s surveillance and enforcement operations.

FALCON

FALCON is Palantir’s investigative analytics platform for ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division. It integrates dozens of government and commercial databases into a single searchable system, allowing ICE agents to search for people by name, location, or vehicle, track targets’ and agents’ locations during enforcement operations in real time, and share information from field encounters as they happen.⁵ A 2018 quarterly report confirmed that ICE had integrated SEVIS data — the records of international students, including biometric identifiers, class schedules, and financial sponsors — directly into FALCON’s production environment, where it sat alongside criminal intelligence databases.⁵

Despite Palantir’s public claims that it does not assist ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations with deportations, FALCON has been used to power workplace raids going back to at least 2016.⁵ A 2020 email obtained through records requests revealed that FALCON had “no automatic deprovisioning triggers” for user accounts, meaning there was no system in place to revoke access when it was no longer appropriate.⁵

ELITE

More recently, 404 Media reported on a Palantir-developed tool called ELITE — Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement. ELITE pulls address data from the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes Medicaid records, and uses it to generate maps of neighborhoods where people ICE may want to detain are concentrated.² It creates individual dossiers on people and assigns confidence scores for how likely someone is to be at a given address.²

The Electronic Frontier Foundation called this “the clearest link yet between the technological infrastructure Palantir is building for ICE and the agency’s activities on the ground.”³ Last year, ICE and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services signed a data sharing agreement covering the personal data of nearly 80 million Medicaid patients.³ The civil liberties concern is straightforward: data collected to provide people with health care is being repurposed to help ICE find and deport them.

ImmigrationOS

In 2025, ICE awarded Palantir a $30 million contract to build a new platform called ImmigrationOS, designed to streamline the identification and apprehension of people targeted for removal, track self-deportations with “near real-time visibility,” and make deportation logistics more efficient.⁶ The platform is intended to combine passport data, Social Security records, IRS information, and license plate reader data into a single operational system.⁶ In the publicly available contract justification, ICE stated it had an “urgent and compelling” need for the system and that Palantir was the “only source” capable of delivering it.⁶

The Expanding Surveillance Apparatus

Palantir’s tools are part of a broader expansion. The Boston Globe reported this week that ICE has signed more than a dozen new contracts for surveillance technologies, including a $4.5 million deal with a Plymouth, Massachusetts company for iris-scanning technology that gives agents the ability to identify people in the field by scanning their irises with a smartphone, running them against a database of five million records.⁷ ICE has also deployed a smartphone app called Mobile Fortify, which has been used more than 100,000 times since its launch, allowing agents to scan a person’s face and search it against 200 million images stored in government databases.⁸

The Department of Homeland Security’s 2025 AI Use Case Inventory lists more than 200 active AI use cases, a 37 percent increase from the prior update. ICE alone added 25 new systems since mid-2025, three of which are Palantir products.⁸

Palantir Executives Funding Auchincloss

While Palantir builds the tools that power mass surveillance and deportation, its top executives are contributing to members of Congress — including Rep. Auchincloss. FEC filings show that in 2025, six Palantir employees contributed a total of $25,350 to Auchincloss for Congress.⁴ These are not rank-and-file employees. The list is dominated by the company’s most senior leadership:

According to the Purge Palantir campaign’s analysis of FEC data going back to 2006, Auchincloss has received $25,100 in total from Palantir executives and the company’s corporate PAC — placing him alongside House Democratic leadership like Hakeem Jeffries ($25,000) and Pete Aguilar ($28,000) as top Democratic recipients of Palantir money.⁹ Palantir’s largest recipient overall is Donald Trump, at over $2 million.⁹

All six of the contributors listed above are identified by the Purge Palantir campaign as senior Palantir leaders who have each donated at least $20,000 to political campaigns. Alexander Karp, Mehdi Alhassani, Akash Jain, Josh Harris, David Glazer — these are not casual donors. They are the people who run the company that builds ICE’s surveillance tools, and they are investing in the political campaigns of the members of Congress who oversee ICE’s budget and authorities.⁹

The WestExec Connection

The relationship between Palantir and the political establishment extends beyond direct campaign contributions. WestExec Advisors, a consulting firm, helped Palantir market its surveillance technology to government agencies including ICE.¹⁰ One of WestExec’s senior advisers, Blas Nuñez-Neto, recently authored a memo advising Democrats to stop saying “Abolish ICE” and instead talk about “reforming and retraining” the agency.¹⁰

So there is a firm that profits from selling ICE its surveillance tools, and one of its advisers turns around and writes the talking points telling Democrats not to challenge the agency that buys those tools. Auchincloss recently hosted Nuñez-Neto as a “special guest” on a Zoom call to discuss recent events — the same week that ICE was conducting raids across the country using Palantir’s technology.

A Question for Rep. Auchincloss

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi has already publicly committed to give back or donate his Palantir contributions and to no longer accept contributions from Palantir employees.⁹ The ask for Rep. Auchincloss is the same.

Congressman Auchincloss should publicly commit to returning or donating every dollar he has received from Palantir employees, and pledge to refuse their contributions going forward.

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