MAGA Inc.: Palantir

When Nathan Bernard, an activist tracking immigration raids in Portland, Maine, filmed an ICE agent taking pictures of her in late January 2026, she questioned why he was photographing her. "Because we have a nice little database, and now you're considered a domestic terrorist,” the masked agent replied.

(Click here for the table of contents of MAGA Inc.: A Guide to Trump's World of Crypto Czars, Tech Titans and Prison Profiteers.) 

Although the agent did not disclose details of the database he was referring to, U.S. government contracting records show that ICE and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have multiple contracts with a company named Palantir to vacuum up digital data of everyday activity across the U.S. to create detailed profiles of individuals.

“ICE can use this type of surveillance apparatus on anyone – not only anyone who is undocumented but anyone who this administration wants to criminalize and anyone who the administration wants to put under surveillance,” Jacinta González, head of programs at digital rights non-profit MediaJustice, told the Guardian newspaper in 2025.

Palantir was founded in 2003 and bankrolled by In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA, to build data analysis and surveillance tools for many U.S. military and national security agencies.

While it has a reputation for analyzing trillions of data points to track everyone at all times, in reality Palantir makes a living turning messy rows and columns of data into point and click maps with fancy charts and graphs that can be viewed on hand-held devices and computer screens to make it easy for analysts and decision makers to feel like they can see everything all at once, no matter how mundane or inaccurate the data is. (The company is named after the indestructible crystal balls from J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings.) In recent years, Palantir has added another layer – the ability to pick an artificial intelligence chatbot to summarize the data and answer questions in simple English.

In 2014, Palantir won a contract to build an analytic tool called Falcon for an ICE division named Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) to search the data it was gathering for a Palantir-managed database called Investigative Case Management, which was based on Gotham, Palantir’s standard product. The original contract allowed ICE personnel to track the hourly locations of specific individuals using their cell phone numbers and add in data from air travel records via the Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) and other datasets like the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) as well as from field interviews.

ImmigrationOS

While this original contract was signed during the presidency of Barack Obama, the contract was dramatically expanded under the second presidency of Donald Trump for an ICE division named Enforcement and Removals Operations (ERO). In April 2025, HSI paid Palantir US$30 million to build a software program called ImmigrationOS to create a “streamlined end to end immigration lifecycle from identification to removal, with increased efficiency in deportation logistics.”

While Palantir has refused to provide details of what exactly it does, clues have surfaced in the media. A CNN report in 2025 suggested that the ImmigrationOS system would allow immigration agents “to approve raids, book arrests, generate legal documents, and route individuals to deportation flights or detention — all from a single interface.”

By January 2026, an investigative website called 404 Media revealed that ICE had deployed an artificial intelligence-powered tool named Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE), designed by Palantir, to summarize tips that it received. The website also revealed that ELITE helps “populate a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address.”

The company acknowledged doing this kind of work in an internal memo reviewed by Wired magazine. “While acknowledging the reputational risk we face when supporting immigration enforcement operations … we believe that our work could [provide] officers and agents with the data to make more precise, informed decisions,” wrote Akash Jain, president of Palantir’s U.S. government division.

Federal cash outlays for these projects have grown exponentially. In 2025, Palantir banked US$81.1 million in ICE contracts from the Trump administration, a four-fold increase over the previous year. And it was awarded a new US$1 billion “blanket purchase agreement” with DHS in February 2026 allowing individual departments to sign contracts with the company without going through competitive bidding, according to Wired magazine.

“The new deepening of Palantir’s ties with ICE through these new contracts is alarming for the human rights of dozens of immigrants and people seeking safety in the United States," Likhita Banerji, deputy director of the Amnesty Tech program at Amnesty International, told El País newspaper. "These technologies can systemically fuel racism, discrimination, and oppression, and are routinely used to further racist and xenophobic agendas.”

Over a dozen former Palantir employees signed a letter last year condemning the new contracts. “Companies are placating Trump’s administration, suppressing dissent, and aligning with his xenophobic, sexist, and oligarchic agenda,” they wrote in May 2025. “Big Tech, including Palantir, is increasingly complicit, normalizing authoritarianism under the guise of a 'revolution' led by oligarchs."

The company’s technology has even drawn criticism from top Silicon Valley investors. “If you’re a first-rate programmer, there are a huge number of other places you can go work rather than at the company building the infrastructure of the police state," Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, which provided seed funding to companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, Dropbox, Instacart and Reddit, wrote on Twitter.

In addition to the concerns over mass surveillance and the indiscriminate invasion of individual privacy to collect this data, there are two other major concerns about the use of this technology:

First, despite the voluminous data that this software can vacuum up, it fails to find criminals who have a basic knowledge of how to cover up their tracks. John Sandweg, a former ICE director under Barack Obama, told the Economist magazine that in reality most of the data is harvested from millions of "undocumented but otherwise law-abiding people" who use cell phones, drive to work or school, pay taxes, and use credit cards.

Second, the use of software-driven tools often leads to erroneous conclusions. For example, DHS admitted to CNN that a website it created to list 25,000 of the “worst of the worst” individuals was filled with mistakes, after reporters identified thousands of people who had been listed for minor traffic offenses. NOTUS, an online news agency, also found that seven of eight people named as violent criminals in a White House press release were incorrectly identified. DHS claimed that the error rate was just five percent.

However, a more comprehensive review of forms submitted by ICE to justify deportation of some 140,000 people in 2025, conducted by the Guardian newspaper, found that some 77 percent did not have any criminal record. And for those 23 percent who did have some kind of police record, just 0.5 percent were for homicide and 9 percent for sexual assault.

Even ICE agents have complained that Palantir’s ELITE is deeply flawed, in testimony provided to an Oregon court in December 2025. “The app could say 100 percent, and it’s wrong. The person doesn’t live there. And so it’s not accurate. It’s a tool that we use that gives you probability, but there’s … no such thing as 100 percent,” said one agent.

For example, Nicole Leland, a director at Target corporation in Minnesota, was following federal officers conducting deportation raids at a Mexican supermarket in January 2026, when she was pulled over by a Border Patrol agent in a white SUV. She was startled when the agent addressed her by name.

“He said he had facial recognition and that his body camera was on,” she told the New York Times. Three days later her flight travel privileges were revoked. Leland decided to join a lawsuit against DHS, challenging the decision.

(A DHS spokesperson told NBC News that the tools were legal. “Mobile Fortify has not been blocked, restricted, or curtailed by the courts or by legal guidance. It is lawfully used nationwide in accordance with all applicable legal authorities,” the spokesperson said.)

ICE also recently activated a contract to use a tool called Graphite, made by Paragon Solutions of Tel Aviv, Israel, that allows it to hack into phones remotely to read WhatsApp and Signal messages. (The original contract was signed by the Biden administration.)

Details of these government contracts are often available on federal government websites, including the US$23.9 million contract with NEC, US$9.2 million in contracts for Clearview AI, some US$2.3 million in contracts for Penlink and US$2 million in contracts for Paragon Solutions.

Project Maven

Project Maven, a secretive Pentagon project to analyze the deluge of data from dozens of sources – notably military aircraft and drones as well as satellite and cellphone data - hunting for targets to kill, also uses Palantir as its principal contractor.

Vice Admiral Frank Whitworth, the director of the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which runs Maven, explained the goal of Palantir’s Maven Smart System (MSS), at a gathering of military contractors at a conference in May 2025. "Army leaders, specifically, are trying to leverage Maven to meet a new vision for units to make a thousand high-quality decisions – choosing and dismissing targets on the battlefield – in one hour," he said.

Tragedy struck less than a year later on February 28, 2026, when Trump launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran. A Tomahawk missile fired at a military facility instead hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab in southern Iran, killing over 100 little girls and dozens of others, despite the fact that any visual inspection of the neighborhood would have shown that it had been used daily as an educational facility for over a decade.

Experts say that the reliance on automated computer data analysis was the problem. “The building in Minab had been classified as a military facility in a Defense Intelligence Agency database. People failed to update a database, and other people built a system fast enough to make that failure lethal,” writes Kevin Banker, a military historian. “It is a bureaucratic question about what happened to the kill chain, and the answer is Palantir.”

Palantir has refused to divulge what Maven does but it does not deny that it has played a role. "If you look at the present day conflict in Iran, the sort of planning that we were able to do with one person in two weeks is something that in Gulf War II actually took 50 people six months," Palantir Technologies CTO Shyam Sankar, and one of the chief architects of Maven, told Fox News.

Sankar explained the evolution of the company software to a reporter at Colossus magazine, describing how he was sent to Afghanistan and Iraq at the height of the U.S. wars to help soldiers use a standard Palantir program called Gotham to turn rows and columns of data into what he called “pointillist paintings” of objects that were easy for them to understand.

Fast forward to 2018. Drew Cukor, a Marine Corps intelligence officer, who was put in charge of Project Maven (officially called the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional team) at the Pentagon, ran into a roadblock: a group of engineers and programmers at Google (the principal Maven contractor at the time) had put together a petition to ask the company to pull out. “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war. Building this technology to assist the US Government in military surveillance – and potentially lethal outcomes – is not acceptable,” they wrote. Google bowed to their demands and withdrew from renewing the contract.

Palantir, on the other hand, had no such scruples. Over the last few years, the company has taken over Maven and created a single window dashboard like Google Earth for military commanders to be able to zoom and click on pictures and links without having to dig deep into the raw data. (The idea, according to Katrina Manson, author of a book on the project, was to create an “aspirational single pane of glass to clear up the fog of war.”)

"You could think of it really as an operating system for data. So, it enables large, complex organizations that will have collected data of myriad different kinds scattered across dozens, hundreds, even thousands of source systems," Louis Mosley, executive vice president of Palantir for Europe and the UK, told the Washington Post.

“How do you begin to make sense of all of that information? How do you assemble it into a virtual representation of that physical reality, which can then be exploited by AI? Synthesis of that entire data landscape into what we call an ontology--you could think of that a bit like a data model or a digital twin, the virtual representation of the physical reality is essential."

Maven allows commanders to ask questions in simple English and provides answers generated by artificial intelligence software in the form of “heat maps” with possible targets, even suggesting which weapons to use and when. It does this with the help of Palantir's new Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) that allows users to choose a chatbot such as Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to interpret the data. (Palantir does not sell its own artificial intelligence software.)

Moseley insists that Palantir simply provides the tools, and the military makes the final decision on what to bomb. "This is not our role to decide life or death," he told the BBC. "AI platforms like Maven have been instrumental to the management of the conflict, but responsibility always remains with the military organization."

Critics say that this is precisely the problem. "If there's a risk of killing and you co-opt a lot of your critical thinking to software that will take care of these things for you, then you just become reliant on the software," Elke Schwarz, a professor at Queen Mary University of London, told the BBC. "It's a race to the bottom."

For gung-ho and damn-the-details leaders like Trump, Maven is a gift from heaven. “Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war fighting capabilities and equipment. Just ask our enemies!!!” Trump posted on social media on April 10, 2026.

Palantir, for its part, has taken the opportunity to promote the visual interfaces that it builds for data-driven decision making at other government entities. “It is, in fact, the same software being used for healthcare systems, for example,” Mosely told the Post. “But of course, the ontology, instead of looking like a tank or an aircraft or a drone, those objects, it's a patient, a clinician, a treatment.”

Indeed, Palantir’s data synthesis systems are currently being used by the UK National Health System under a £330 million contract to centralize patient information and facilitate health trend analysis.

However, not unlike ELITE, ImmigrationOS and Project Maven, new reports suggest that Palantir’s software has failed to help British hospitals. For example, Palantir claimed that it had cut inpatients surgery waiting lists at the Chelsea & Westminster Hospitals in London by 28 percent, when raw data seen by the British Medical Journal showed the opposite. (Lists of patients waiting for general surgery rose by 12.6 percent and gynaecology rose by 4 percent).

British doctors have denounced the contract and are refusing to use the Palantir system.

“If Palantir’s software is being used to target individuals in immigration enforcement and is being deployed in active conflict zones, then that’s completely incompatible with the values we uphold in the delivery of care,” Dr David Wrigley, the deputy chair of the British Medical Association said in a statement.