Follow the Stack · Grievance
Surveillance & deportation
Building or supplying surveillance or deportation infrastructure targeting people.
34 documented facts
404 Media reported, based on internal ICE material, public procurement records and sworn testimony from an ICE official, that Palantir is working on ELITE, an ICE tool that populates a map with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person with a "confidence score" on their current address, and receives addresses from the Department of Health and Human Services among other sources. ICE uses it to find locations where many people it might detain could be based.
Capgemini's US subsidiary Capgemini Government Solutions won the largest share of a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) tender for nationwide "skip tracing" services to identify and locate foreign nationals, with a first $4.8 million order released in December 2025 and a potential value of up to $365 million, including bonuses tied to the rate of verified addresses. A Capgemini web page had described the work as helping to reduce the time and cost of deportations; it was removed after the contract was reported. On 1 February 2026 Capgemini announced it would sell the subsidiary.
Response: Capgemini said US rules on classified contracts prevented it from accessing the subsidiary's contracts and from exercising "appropriate control over certain aspects of the operations of this subsidiary". CEO Aiman Ezzat wrote that "the nature and scope of this work has raised questions" and that the subsidiary's independent board "has already begun the process of reviewing the content and scope of this contract".
Removed a Chicago Facebook group used to report sightings of immigration agents after outreach from the Justice Department, as announced by Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said the page was used to "dox and target" ICE agents.
Response: Meta said the group "was removed for violating our policies against coordinated harm".
Removed Red Dot and similar apps used to report sightings of ICE officials from the Play Store, 404 Media reported, after Apple removed ICEBlock following direct pressure from Justice Department officials.
Response: Google said the apps shared the location of what it described as a vulnerable group that had recently faced a violent act connected to such apps, which 404 Media described as a veiled reference to ICE officials.
Removed ICEBlock, an app for reporting the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, and similar apps from the App Store after the US Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Justice Department had demanded it.
Response: Apple said it removed the app "based on information we've received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock". The app's creator, Joshua Aaron, said he was "incredibly disappointed by Apple's actions".
Was awarded an ICE Homeland Security Investigations contract for facial recognition software, with an initial $3,750,000 purchase on September 5, 2025 and a total value of up to $9,225,000. Procurement records state it supports identifying victims and offenders in child sexual exploitation cases and in "assaults against law enforcement officers". The contract began days before ICE launched its "Midway Blitz" immigration enforcement operation in the Chicago area.
Sent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) a five-page memo, in response to an ICE request for information, explaining how Salesforce could help the agency with "talent acquisition" to achieve its goal "to nearly triple its work force by hiring 10,000 new officers and agents expeditiously", according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times. Other documents included a spreadsheet of ICE contract "opportunities" and an internal brainstorming slide deck on how AI agents might help ICE evaluate tip-line information and improve investigations. Salesforce did not dispute the documents' authenticity.
“identify, engage and acquire the talent profile proven to drive ICE mission success, and in turn, administration priorities”
Response: A Salesforce spokeswoman said the company does not discuss contracts. The company said it has served the US government under many administrations and that all of its customers are bound by company policies to use its products responsibly.
A joint investigation by The Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call reported that Israel's military intelligence Unit 8200 stored recordings of millions of intercepted phone calls of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank on Microsoft's Azure cloud, with Microsoft engineers working with the unit on the infrastructure. In September 2025 Microsoft said its review had found "evidence that supports elements" of the reporting and disabled the services concerned.
Response: Microsoft initially said it had "no information" about the data stored and was not aware of surveillance of civilians. Brad Smith later wrote: "We do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians."
The Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte (GFF), backed by the Chaos Computer Club, filed a constitutional complaint against the Bavarian police's use of Palantir's Gotham software under the name VeRA, arguing that it lacks an adequate legal basis and effective oversight, also targets people who are not suspects, and that such algorithms often have discriminatory effects. VeRA draws on data already collected by Bavarian police; the case-processing system IGVP alone held records on about 38.7 million people at the end of August 2022, 60% of them witnesses, victims or informants.
Response: Bavaria's interior ministry considers the use lawful and necessary for effective hazard prevention and says no competitive European alternative exists; the Bavarian parliament voted a legal basis for VeRA in July 2024. The complaint is pending before the Federal Constitutional Court.
The New York Times reported that the Trump administration had turned to Palantir to put in place the technical building blocks for sharing data on Americans across federal agencies, following a March 2025 executive order, with its Foundry software deployed in at least four federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services. Ten Democratic lawmakers wrote to Palantir calling a possible searchable "mega-database" a "surveillance nightmare".
Response: Palantir denied many of the claims in a May 30 blog post, saying it does not have the ability to "proactively share data across federal government sources", and in a June 17 response to the lawmakers stated that "Palantir is not building a master database, and Palantir is neither conducting nor enabling mass surveillance of American citizens."
Search logs obtained through a public records request showed more than 4,000 lookups in Flock's nationwide automatic license plate reader network by local and state police done at the behest of federal law enforcement, as an "informal" favor to it, or with a potential immigration focus, with reasons such as "immigration", "ICE" and "ICE+ERO", giving federal law enforcement side-door access to a tool for which Flock had no formal contract with ICE.
Palantir representatives took part with DOGE in a project to build a "mega API" over all IRS databases, which hold taxpayer names, addresses, Social Security numbers and tax returns, with DOGE aiming for Palantir's Foundry to become the "read center of all IRS systems", according to IRS sources cited by WIRED.
Response: A Treasury spokesperson said "there is no contract signed yet and many vendors are being considered, Palantir being one of them." Palantir did not immediately respond to WIRED.
The Washington Post reported that the Social Security Administration purposely and falsely labeled about 6,100 living immigrants as dead by adding them to its Death Master File, under a strategy pushed by Musk's U.S. DOGE Service and the Department of Homeland Security to cut them off from legally earning wages and push them to leave the country. A senior executive who objected to the plan, and had clashed with the chief information officer installed by Musk, was escorted out of the building and placed on leave.
Response: White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that "the Trump Administration is protecting lawful American citizens and their hard-earned Social Security benefits, and ensuring illegal immigrants will no longer receive such economic entitlements."
Awarded a roughly $30 million ICE contract to build "ImmigrationOS", a platform to identify and apprehend people for deportation and track "self-deportations".
Signed a five-year contract worth about €24 million, reportedly without an exit clause, with the Baden-Württemberg interior ministry for police data analysis, before the state had a legal basis for automated police data analysis and, according to taz, apparently without the knowledge of the Green coalition partner. The enabling bill was only tabled in September 2025; bodies consulted on it, including the DGB union confederation, criticised the contract being signed before a legal basis existed.
Response: The state government says funds for the software were approved in the 2025/2026 budget in December 2024 and that a first draft of the enabling law already existed when the contract was signed.
Removed from its AI Principles the earlier commitment not to pursue weapons or "technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms".
Response: In a blog post co-written by Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Google cited a global competition for AI leadership and said democracies should lead AI development and work together on AI that "supports national security".
At Oracle's 2024 financial analyst meeting, described a future AI-powered surveillance system constantly recording and reporting what citizens do.
“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on”
Sandvine, a network equipment maker acquired by Francisco Partners in a 2017 deal, was added by the US Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security to its Entity List on February 26, 2024, for selling deep packet inspection technology to the Egyptian government, which used it "in mass web-monitoring and censorship to block news as well as target political actors and human rights activists". In 2020 Bloomberg had reported that Sandvine equipment was used in Belarus to block websites during protests over the disputed presidential election, after which Sandvine cancelled its Belarus contract. Francisco Partners told Bloomberg in August 2024 that it no longer owned Sandvine.
Response: In 2020 Sandvine said that "custom code was developed and inserted into Sandvine's products to thwart the free flow of information" in Belarus, called this "a human rights violation" and said it "abhors" the use of technology to suppress information. In September 2024 it announced it would leave 56 non-democratic countries, including Egypt. Access Now reported that Francisco Partners did not respond to its calls to address the Belarus case.
Germany's Federal Constitutional Court ruled unconstitutional the Hesse and Hamburg police laws authorising automated data analysis. In Hesse the analysis platform was Palantir's Gotham software, used by police under the name "HessenDATA".
Training documents obtained by The Intercept showed that Google was offering the Israeli government, through the $1.2 billion Project Nimbus cloud contract shared with Amazon, AI capabilities including facial detection, automated image categorization, object tracking and sentiment analysis.
Response: Google did not respond to The Intercept's request for comment. The documents appeared to be standard training materials distributed to Google Cloud customers.
IPVM, in a report produced in collaboration with The New York Times, found that Alibaba Cloud's content-security API documentation listed detection of whether a face is Uyghur ("是否是维族") and whether a person is an ethnic minority among its facial-recognition attributes. Alibaba Cloud removed these mentions from its website after being contacted.
“是否是少数民族（维族）。”
Response: Alibaba said: "We are dismayed to learn that Alibaba Cloud developed a facial recognition technology in a testing environment that included ethnicity as an algorithm attribute for tagging video imagery. We never intended our technology to be used for and will not permit it to be used for targeting specific ethnic groups, and we have eliminated any ethnic tag in our product offering. This trial technology was not deployed by any customer."
US Customs and Border Protection accepted in August 2020 a proposal to use Google Cloud to support the AI work of its innovation team, which was developing a "virtual" border wall of surveillance towers and drones with Anduril, according to contract documents reported by The Intercept.
Response: Google declined to comment on the contract.
Won a US Customs and Border Protection indefinite-delivery contract for AI-powered autonomous surveillance towers along the US border, receiving $25 million in July and $36 million in September 2020, with CBP planning 200 towers by 2022. The system autonomously identifies people crossing the border and sends push alerts to border agents.
GitHub CEO Nat Friedman told staff in a leaked internal email that the company would renew its $200,000 GitHub Enterprise Server licence with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), despite employee objections to the agency's immigration policies; employees later resigned after the renewal, according to CNBC.
Response: Friedman wrote that GitHub had no agreement to provide professional services to ICE and "has no visibility into how this software is being used", and announced a $500,000 donation to immigration nonprofits.
Francisco Partners owned NSO Group, the Israeli maker of the Pegasus spyware sold to governments, from its 2014 acquisition until it sold the company to its founders and Novalpina Capital in February 2019. On November 1, 2018, the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab sent Francisco Partners an open letter on the continued misuse of Pegasus, citing its findings of likely Pegasus infections in 45 countries and its high-confidence assessment that the phone of Saudi activist Omar Abdulaziz, a collaborator of the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, had been infected by an operator probably linked to the Saudi government. The letter said an earlier letter of May 29, 2018 remained unanswered.
Response: According to Citizen Lab, Francisco Partners had written on February 20, 2018 that it was "very much willing to engage in a constructive dialogue with Citizen Lab".
Amazon Web Services sales staff pitched the Rekognition facial recognition service to ICE's Homeland Security Investigations unit at a June 2018 meeting, according to emails obtained by the Project on Government Oversight. An AWS employee wrote that the company was "ready and willing to support the vital HSI mission".
Response: AWS said Rekognition was discussed at technology "boot camps" and that it followed up with interested customers, ICE being one of them. ICE said it had no contract to buy Rekognition.
Public records released by the ACLU showed Amazon marketing its Rekognition facial recognition service to police and helping deploy it: the Washington County Sheriff's Office in Oregon built an app to check images against about 300,000 booking photos, and Orlando police piloted real-time detection of "persons of interest" from city cameras.
Response: Amazon said it "requires that customers comply with the law and be responsible when they use" its services.
The University of Toronto's Citizen Lab reported that deep packet inspection middleboxes on Türk Telekom's network, which it matched to PacketLogic devices made by Sandvine (formerly Procera Networks), were used to redirect users in Turkey and Syria who tried to download legitimate Windows programs to spyware, first FinFisher and then spyware similar to StrongPity, and that similar devices at a Telecom Egypt demarcation point redirected users to affiliate ads and cryptocurrency mining scripts. At the time Sandvine was owned by Francisco Partners, which had combined it with Procera in 2017. The Associated Press reported that some targets may have been affiliated with the Kurdish YPG.
Response: Sandvine called the allegations "technically inaccurate and intentionally misleading", said in a letter to Citizen Lab that PacketLogic "is not capable of any form of payload injection, malicious or not", and said it could not finish its own inquiry without Citizen Lab's full findings. Türk Telekom said it complies with Turkish law and does not redirect users to malicious downloads.
Added US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as a customer in March 2018, under a contract providing recruiting and communications tools. In June 2018, after more than 650 employees signed a letter asking the company to reconsider the contract because of family separations at the border, CEO Marc Benioff declined to end it in a memo to staff, saying the company's software was not involved in the agency's border policy.
Response: Benioff wrote in the memo: "I'm opposed to separating children from their families at the border. It is immoral." Salesforce pledged $1 million to organisations helping affected families.
The Verge revealed that since 2012 Palantir had provided software to a New Orleans police program, set up as a philanthropic partnership outside public procurement, that traced people's ties to gang members, outlined criminal histories, analysed social media and predicted the likelihood that individuals would commit violence or become victims. Key city council members were unaware of it. In March 2018 the mayor's office said it would not renew the pro bono contract.
Emails obtained by WNYC under FOIA showed that ICE agents preparing the January 2018 raids on nearly a hundred 7-Eleven stores were told to use Palantir's FALCON mobile app, which searches databases including immigration histories and family relationships, and that Palantir staff supported agents ahead of operations.
Response: Palantir declined WNYC's requests for comment.
Promoted in a January 2018 blog post its Azure Government cloud work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), saying it met the standards to handle ICE's "most sensitive unclassified data" and let employees "utilize deep learning capabilities to accelerate facial recognition and identification". The section was briefly deleted and then restored in June 2018, as the family separation policy at the border drew criticism.
Response: Microsoft said an employee had briefly deleted the section by mistake after seeing social media commentary. It said it was "dismayed by the forcible separation of children from their families at the border" and that it did not believe ICE was using its services for anything to do with separating families.
Homeland Security documents obtained through FOIA litigation showed that Palantir software was central to a 2017 ICE operation targeting the parents and relatives who sponsored unaccompanied migrant children. ICE told The Intercept the operation led to 443 arrests, including 35 criminal arrests.
Response: Palantir had previously stated: "We do not work for E.R.O." (ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations). Palantir did not immediately comment on the documents.
Government documents reported by The Intercept showed that ICE was deploying Investigative Case Management (ICM), a system built by Palantir under a $41 million contract awarded in 2014, which lets agents search data from multiple federal and private law enforcement sources to identify targets and build cases. The documents described ICM as "mission critical" to ICE.