Palantir insists it doesn't do surveillance. Its contracts, leaked manuals and ICE's own officials describe something else: a private company wiring together the government's data on millions of people living in America, and now one step from running the agency that guards federal networks.
By Joseph J. Jackson | Florida Man News Network | Nov. 12, 2026
FMNN Investigates is reported analysis. Conclusions are drawn from the public record and labeled as FMNN's assessment.
The short version
What Palantir says: It "does not build surveillance technology" and is "neither conducting nor enabling mass surveillance of American citizens."
What ICE says: Palantir systems give agents a list of 20 million people on their iPhones and raised the rate of finding targets from about 27% to nearly 80%.
Your health data: A Palantir-built ICE app called ELITE pulls addresses from HHS, which runs Medicaid, puts people on a map, builds a file on each one and scores how sure ICE is of their address.
Your tax data: The IRS has paid Palantir more than $130 million since 2018 for software that links tax returns, bank records, ACA data and calls, texts and emails.
Your government: DHS signed a five-year deal worth up to $1 billion letting its agencies buy from Palantir without competitive bidding. And the White House just nominated Palantir's security chief to run CISA.
Palantir Technologies has spent two decades insisting it is not what its critics say it is.
"Palantir does not build surveillance technology," the company said in June 2025, after members of Congress demanded answers about its work at the IRS. In another statement that month, it said it was "neither conducting nor enabling mass surveillance of American citizens." [1][2]
FMNN went through the record: federal contracts, leaked ICE manuals, sworn testimony, statements by ICE officials and reporting from 404 Media, The Intercept, Wired, NPR, The New York Times and others.
Here is what that record shows. A private company, seeded by the CIA's venture arm and chaired by Trump ally Peter Thiel, now builds and runs the systems the federal government uses to find, track and profile millions of people living in the United States. Those systems draw on tax returns, health insurance records, bank data, travel records and phone data. They are run with Palantir engineers, often on Palantir-hosted systems, under contracts the government repeatedly says no one else can fill.
Palantir calls that data integration. FMNN's assessment, based on the record below, is that the label no longer fits. In practice, Palantir has become the federal government's domestic surveillance contractor.
Part 1: The deportation machine
Palantir's work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement goes back to 2014, under the Obama administration. [3] It built ICE's Investigative Case Management system and the FALCON tools agents used in the field. [3][4]
The second Trump administration took that work much further.
ImmigrationOS. In April 2025, ICE gave Palantir about $30 million, without competitive bidding, to build what it calls the Immigration Lifecycle Operating System. [5] The contract describes a system covering immigrants' cases "from identification to removal," with "near real-time visibility" into people who leave the country on their own. Visa overstays were listed as enforcement priorities alongside violent criminals. [6]
ICE said it skipped bidding because Palantir was the only company that could deliver fast enough. Its justification noted that Palantir's systems were "already ingesting and processing data from multiple ICE, DHS, and external sources." [7] The deal wasn't just for software. ICE required Palantir to provide licenses, configuration, engineering and hosting. [8] ICE renewed the work with another $29.9 million no-bid task order in September 2025. [9]
ELITE. In January 2026, 404 Media obtained a user guide for a Palantir-built ICE tool called ELITE, short for Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement. [10] Here is how it works, according to the guide and sworn testimony by an ICE official:
Agents see a map of the United States with potential deportation targets on it. [10]
Clicking one brings up a file on that person: name, photo, date of birth and alien registration number. [11]
Each person gets an "address confidence score" out of 100 showing how sure ICE is that the person lives where the system says. [12]
Agents can pick people one at a time or draw a shape on the map to select a whole area. [12]
The addresses come from sources including the Department of Health and Human Services, which runs Medicaid, and Thomson Reuters' commercial CLEAR database. [12][13]
An ICE official testified in Oregon that ELITE had already been used to pick areas for operations. [10] Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said the app shows the "completely indiscriminate nature" of ICE's operations. [12]
Your Medicaid card. In 2025, ICE and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services signed a data-sharing agreement covering the personal data of nearly 80 million Medicaid patients, first reported by the Associated Press. [14] Health experts warned it could scare immigrant families away from care, including U.S.-citizen children. [14] The Electronic Frontier Foundation said ELITE was the first evidence its warnings about consolidated government data had come true. [15]
20 million people on a phone. In May 2026, at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix, ICE assistant director Matthew Elliston described what Palantir's tools had done for the agency, according to four attendees who spoke to 404 Media: [16]
Agents have a list of about 20 million potential targets on their iPhones. The system can lead agents to one person's house and show whether another target lives next door.
The rate of finding a target rose from about 27% to just under 80%.
Investigations that took hours now take 10 to 15 minutes.
Palantir gives ICE access to 30 to 40 datasets.
404 Media cautioned that officials' sales-floor claims deserve some skepticism. [16] But consider who is being found. ICE's own detention data, as reported by 404 Media, showed 70.8% of people in ICE detention, 42,722 people, had no criminal conviction. [17]
Minneapolis. In January 2026, federal agents surged into Minneapolis in "Operation Metro Surge." Federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. CNN reported ICE officers had gathered private information on protesters and had "documented details" on Pretti before he was killed. [18] Inside Palantir, internal Slack messages reviewed by Wired showed employees pressing leadership on whether the company should keep working with ICE. [19] Days later, CEO Alex Karp defended the company's technology on an earnings call without mentioning Minnesota. [20]
Part 2: Your tax return, your bank account, your texts
Immigrants were the first target. The same tools reach everyone else.
The IRS since 2018. In April 2026, The Intercept published contract records obtained by the watchdog group American Oversight. They show the IRS has paid Palantir more than $130 million since 2018 for its Lead and Case Analytics platform. [21] According to the documents, the system links:
Individual tax forms and returns
Affordable Care Act data
Bank statements and transactions
"All available" data from the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network
Networks of people and their communications, including calls, texts and emails, plus IP address analysis [21][22]
The system started under Trump's first term and grew under Biden. [21] Palantir engineers keep updating it while working alongside IRS staff. [22] It now sits in an IRS Criminal Investigation division that, under Trump, has pivoted toward investigating "left-leaning groups," the Wall Street Journal reported. [22]
The "mega-database." In April 2025, CNN and Wired reported that DOGE staffers were building a master database combining data from across the government to speed up deportations, with Palantir involved. [23] Over objections from career IRS officials, some of whom quit, the administration pushed through a data-sharing deal between the IRS and ICE that April. [23][24]
In May 2025, The New York Times reported that the administration had brought in Palantir to combine data across agencies under a March 2025 executive order, with Palantir's Foundry software in use at four or more agencies, including DHS and HHS. [25] Sen. Wyden, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and eight other Democrats called a searchable database of tax returns and other data shared across agencies a "surveillance nightmare" that would likely break the Privacy Act and tax confidentiality law. [26]
Palantir's answer: "Palantir is not building a master database." [2]
Read that carefully. Palantir says it isn't building a master database. The contracts show Palantir building, configuring and hosting the systems that connect the databases, and a government saying openly that connecting them is the goal.
Part 3: Watching the people who work for you
In May 2026, The American Prospect found that the Agriculture Department had paid Palantir an initial $3.9 million to build a tool tracking USDA employees' return to the office. Disclosures showed similar plans at Social Security and Veterans Affairs. [27] Union officials at Social Security said they expect the tracking to be used to justify closing more field offices. [27]
Part 4: It started with the police
Palantir's domestic work didn't begin with Trump.
From 2012 to 2018, Palantir ran a predictive policing program with the New Orleans Police Department. It mapped people's ties to gang members, analyzed social media and estimated who was likely to commit violence or be a victim. [28] Palantir set it up as a pro bono philanthropic gift through the mayor's office, so it never went through public procurement. Key city council members and defense attorneys told The Verge they had no idea it existed. [28][29] New Orleans ended the program weeks after it was exposed. [30]
In Los Angeles, sociologist Sarah Brayne, who spent two years studying the LAPD, found officers could "subscribe" to a person in Palantir's system and get alerts when that person turned up, starting from as little as a name or a license plate. [31]
Then and now, the pattern is the same: the public finds out after the system is already running.
Part 5: The money
Palantir holds about $2 billion in federal contracts across Defense, Homeland Security, State, Agriculture, Veterans Affairs and HHS, according to government records cited by NPR. The company is valued at more than $350 billion. [32]
Its U.S. government revenue was $953 million last quarter, up 96% from a year earlier. [33]
In February 2026, DHS signed a five-year blanket purchase agreement worth up to $1 billion. It lets ICE, CBP, FEMA, CISA and other DHS agencies buy Palantir products without competitive bidding. [34][35]
Palantir more than doubled its federal lobbying, from under $3 million in 2023 to over $6 million the next year, and has been hiring Democratic-connected lobbyists, according to OpenSecrets data cited by Sludge. [36]
Part 6: The CISA connection
When DHS signed that $1 billion deal, Palantir CTO Akash Jain emailed employees, Wired reported. He said it could open the door to new work with the Secret Service, FEMA, the TSA and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. [37]
Nine months later, on Nov. 9, the White House nominated Michael LoSapio, Palantir's chief information security officer, to run CISA. [38] CISA protects federal civilian networks and the country's critical infrastructure, including election systems. (FMNN covered the nomination Nov. 10.)
If confirmed, a Palantir executive would lead an agency that can now buy Palantir software without a bid, under a deal Palantir's own CTO saw as a way into that agency. That's the question senators should ask first.
Part 7: The defense, and why it doesn't hold
Palantir's case, in its strongest form:
"We sell software. The government owns the data and decides how to use it."
"Our software has audit logs and permission controls that limit what agents can see." Karp said in February 2026 that freedom from government surveillance requires a system "built to make possible oversight of its own use." [20]
"We've worked for every administration, both parties." That is true. The ICE work began under Obama, and the IRS work grew under Biden. [3][21]
"We're not doing this domestically." In March 2026, Karp said there was "never a sense" that Palantir's military AI would be used inside the U.S. [39]
What the record shows:
"Just software" doesn't match the contracts. ICE required Palantir to configure, engineer and host ImmigrationOS. [8] ICE justified skipping competition because Palantir's systems were already pulling in data from ICE, DHS and outside sources. [7] Palantir engineers work alongside IRS staff to keep updating the system. [22] A leaked internal Palantir wiki called the company a "more mature partner to ICE." [16] That's not a vendor shipping a box. It's a partner running the operation.
Audit logs don't stop a lawful-but-abusive use. An audit log records that an agent pulled a Medicaid address. It doesn't stop the pull. And no one outside the government can read those logs.
Bipartisan doesn't mean harmless. It means both parties built the pipes. The question is what flows through them now, and the current administration has said plainly that combining data is the goal.
Karp's "never domestic" comment was about the Pentagon's battlefield AI. It wasn't about ICE, the IRS, HHS or USDA, where Palantir's domestic work is documented in the government's own contracts.
Even Palantir's newest hire concedes the core point. Former Sen. Jon Tester, who joined Palantir as an adviser this month, told the Montana Free Press: "I believe Palantir performed a service and it was used in a way that didn't meet the civil liberties and the Constitution of this country." [40]
Part 8: Florida
Palantir moved its headquarters from Denver to Miami in February 2026. [41] The company that builds ICE's targeting tools is now a Florida company, in a state that has made immigration enforcement a centerpiece of state policy.
Florida's own privacy law, the Digital Bill of Rights, covers large tech companies but exempts data held by government. Only the attorney general can enforce it. (FMNN explainer.)
FMNN is preparing public records requests for any Palantir contracts or data-sharing agreements with Florida state agencies, sheriffs' offices and police departments in Tampa Bay.
What comes next
The new Congress. Wyden, expected to chair the Senate Finance Committee in January, says he'll re-ask his Palantir questions. His office told NPR that if Palantir doesn't respond, "compulsory processes will be on the table," meaning subpoenas. [42]
Earlier demands. Wyden sent Palantir another letter on April 14, 2026. [42] That same month, 34 lawmakers pressed DHS to disclose the data sources and safeguards behind ImmigrationOS. [43]
The CISA hearing. LoSapio's confirmation is the first public chance to ask a Palantir executive, under oath, about the DHS deal and the company's data work.
Shareholders. A 2026 shareholder proposal asked Palantir's board to publish a human rights impact assessment of how its products are used. [44]
The lobbying push. Palantir is hiring Democrats, Tester among them, as the party takes control of Congress. [32][36] Tester says the company first approached him in July. [40]
FMNN asked Palantir for comment on the findings in this story before publication. This story will be updated with any response.
Related reading
The Seeing Stone: How Peter Thiel Built a Business Watching You
Trump Taps Palantir's Security Chief to Run the Nation's Cyber Defense Agency
What Is Palantir? The CIA-Backed Data Firm Behind ICE's Case Systems
License Plate Readers in Florida: What They Collect and How Long Police Keep It
Sources
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