“No different vendor might meet these timeframes of getting the infrastructure in place to fulfill this pressing requirement and ship a prototype in lower than six months,” ICE says within the doc.
ICE’s doc doesn’t specify the info sources Palantir would pull from to energy ImmigrationOS. Nonetheless, it says that Palantir might “configure” the case administration system that it has offered to ICE since 2014.
Palantir has executed work at various other authorities businesses as early as 2007. Except for ICE, it’s labored with the US Military, Air Power, Navy, Inner Income Service, and Federal Bureau of Investigation. As reported by WIRED, Palantir is at present serving to Elon Musk’s so-called Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE) construct a model new “mega API” on the IRS that would seek for data throughout all of the completely different databases that the company maintains.
Final week, 404 Media reported {that a} latest model of Palantir’s case administration system for ICE permits brokers to seek for individuals based mostly on “tons of of various, extremely particular classes,” together with how an individual entered the nation, their present authorized standing, and their nation of origin. It additionally contains an individual’s hair and eye coloration, whether or not they have scars or tattoos, and their license plate reader knowledge, which would offer detailed location knowledge about the place that particular person travels by automobile.
These functionalities have been talked about in a authorities privateness evaluation revealed in 2016, and it’s not clear what new data could 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 increased the value of the contract 5 instances 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 revealed Thursday, in the meantime, has a extra detailed description of Palantir’s anticipated companies 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 individuals with scholar visas and inexperienced playing cards, and deported at least 238 individuals to a brutal megaprison in El Salvador, a few of whom haven’t been capable of communicate with a lawyer or have due course of.
As a part of its efforts to push individuals to self-deport, DHS in late March revoked the short-term parole of more than half a million people and demanded that they self-deport in a few month, regardless of having been granted authorization to reside within the US after fleeing harmful or unstable conditions in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela underneath the so-called “CHNV parole applications.”
Final week, the Social Safety Administration listed more than 6,000 of these people as lifeless, a tactic meant to finish their monetary lives. DHS, in the meantime, despatched emails to an unknown variety of individuals declaring that their parole had been revoked, and demanding them to self-deport. A number of US residents, together with immigration attorneys, obtained the e-mail.
On Monday, a federal choose temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s transfer to revoke the individuals’s authorization to reside within the US underneath the CHNV applications. White Home spokesperson Karoline Leavitt called the judge’s ruling “rogue.”