Data Company Directly Powers Immigration Raids in Workplace
Palantir Technologies, co-founded by a Trump advisor in Silicon Valley, has created a smart-phone app that helps ICE round up undocumented workers. The number of arrests has shot up.
Palantir, a secretive data-mining firm co-founded by Trump adviser Peter Thiel, is facing mounting criticism for its work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In response, the company has tried to distance itself from ICE’s controversial treatment of undocumented immigrants.
But now, emails obtained by WNYC show that Palantir software has directly powered ICE’s accelerating workplace raids.
In the final weeks of 2017, special agents in ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations’ division were planning a worksite blitz across New York City. As part of their preparation, an ICE supervisor notified staff that they needed to use a Palantir program, called FALCON mobile, for the operation.
“[REDACTION] we want all the team leaders to utilize the FALCON mobile app on your GOV iphones,” wrote the agent, after mentioning several “assignment” locations across all five New York City boroughs.
The email, obtained by WNYC under the federal Freedom of Information Act, continues: “We will be using the FALCON mobile app to share info with the command center about the subjects encountered in the stores as well as team locations."
FALCON mobile allows agents in the field to search through a fusion of law enforcement databases that include information on people’s immigration histories, family relationships, and past border crossings.
The email was sent in preparation for a worksite enforcement briefing on January 8, 2018. Two days later, ICE raided nearly a hundred 7-Elevens across the country, including at least sixteen in New York City. At the time, the raids constituted the largest operation against a single employer in the Trump era.
Other records in the release show just how looped in Palantir employees are with ICE operations, at worksites and otherwise.
In one email from April of last year, a Palantir staffer notifies an ICE agent that they should test out their FALCON mobile application because of his or her “possible involvement in an upcoming operation.” Another message, in April 2017, shows a Palantir support representative instructing an agent on how to classify a datapoint, so that Palantir’s Investigative Case Management [ICM] platform could properly ingest records of a cell phone seizure.
Advocates say the use of Palantir software in these raids contradict the company’s public attempts to draw a clean line between its work and the detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants.
“What these records show is that Palantir’s programs are being used in the field everyday when ICE is conducting their raids,” said Jacinta Gonzalez, field director with Mijente, an immigrants’ rights group. “Everywhere you go you see people, average families, going to work and being detained in the raids, and it’s all because of Palantir’s FALCON and ICM product.”
From October 2017 to 2018, ICE workplace raids nationwide led to 1,525 administrative worksite-related arrests for civil immigration violations, compared to just 172 the year prior. One of the largest of these raids came last April, when ICE agents stormed into a Tennessee meatpacking plant and put 54 workers in immigrant detention.
Palantir declined WNYC’s requests for comment. Citing law enforcement “sensitivities,” ICE also declined to comment on how it uses Palantir during worksite enforcement operations.
But former ICE HSI agents familiar with Palantir’s capabilities say the data-mining software offers significant support for workplace investigations.
Claude Arnold, a former ICE HSI special agent in Los Angeles, praised Palantir’s ability to connect the dots for law enforcement. “It was just amazing how stuff would get linked by this phone number, by this address. And not only linking, but it would show you who or what is at the center of all that,” said Arnold, who retired in 2015.
James T. Hayes, Jr., former Special Agent in Charge at New York’s HSI office, said the ability to look up unknown subjects with Palantir’s mobile app in the field could also crack open investigations.
“When you encounter individuals through an enforcement operation, whether they’re targets of the operation or not, you’re going to make an effort to question those people,” he said. “If you are looking for a particular individual on site at that time, they might know where they are. They might know other places they work.”
In addition to arrests for civil immigration violations, ICE worksite enforcement operations also led to over seven hundred criminal arrests in the fiscal year 2018. But the majority of these charged were undocumented workers, not their employers.
News of Palantir’s role in workplace raids come at a critical time for the firm. In May, Bloomberg reported that the company may be planning to go public next year. At the same time, it is facing considerable backlash, internally and externally, for its work with ICE.
In May, a coalition of tech workers protested Palantir after Mijente, the immigrants’ advocacy group, pointed to documents showing how Palantir software may have been used to investigate the parents of unaccompanied minors who crossed the border.
For years, Palantir’s contracts with federal agencies like ICE went under the radar, and helped keep the company growing. But today its shadowy reputation has sometimes made sales harder, especially in the Trump era. “There are lots of customers globally and some domestically who feel they do not want to be affiliated with a company that powers the clandestine agencies of the world,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp told the Wall Street Journal last year.
Activists are doing their best to publicize Palantir’s record in an effort to get the firm to cut ties with ICE. “Big industries and big companies and big banks are saying, ‘I will not invest in private prisons. I will not invest in private detention centers. I will not help strengthen this infrastructure,’” said Gonzalez. “Palantir should take notice because investors are going to notice as well.”
Palantir’s latest software development efforts could further improve ICE’s attempts to identify undocumented immigrants. Last July, the company filed a patent application for a mobile image recognition program.The outline describes how users could take a picture of a subject’s face in the field and then run that face against a database, identifying possible facial matches.
George Joseph can be emailed securely with a protonmail email account at gmjoseph@protonmail.com. You can also text him, via the encrypted phone app Signal or otherwise, at 929-486-4865.