Palantir Built ICE a Hunting App Called ELITE

The deportation tech stack is here. Confidence scores on human beings and all.

Palantir – Peter Thiel’s data mining company that already sounds like a villain from Lord of the Rings – just built ICE a hunting app. Not metaphorically. An actual app called ELITE that puts faces on a map so agents can pick their targets like they’re ordering Uber Eats.

Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement. That’s what ELITE stands for. They really workshopped that acronym to sound friendly, didn’t they?

Here’s how it works. Open the app. See a map populated with deportation targets. Click on a person. Get their full dossier – name, date of birth, photo, Alien Registration Number. And here’s the fucked up part – there’s a confidence score. Out of 100. On how sure the app is about where this human being currently lives.

This is a $29.9 million contract that started in September 2025. No competitive bidding. Just Palantir. They’ve got another $30 million deal for ImmigrationOS – a platform that tracks people who self-deport, helps ICE prioritize targets, and manages the entire deportation logistics chain. That one’s been running since April 2025.

Let me connect the dots here. Peter Thiel – Palantir co-founder, billionaire, early Trump backer. JD Vance – Trump’s VP, whose Senate run got $15 million from Thiel through a super PAC. Thiel literally brought Vance to Mar-a-Lago in 2021 to patch things up with Trump before his Senate run.

Now Palantir’s pulling in over $900 million in federal contracts for 2025. That’s nearly double the $541 million they got in 2024. Their stock price has surged 200% since Trump’s election.

Internal Palantir documents obtained by 404 Media show the company describing itself as now being “a more mature partner to ICE.” Former Palantir employees are speaking out – which is rare, since most sign non-disparagement agreements when they leave. Thirteen of them wrote a letter condemning the company’s work with the Trump administration.

CEO Alex Karp defended the work at the New York Times DealBook Summit. His argument? They don’t collect data, they just provide software that processes data clients already have. Internally, Palantir says its ICE work can promote “efficiency, transparency, and accountability.”

The company justified its ICE contracts internally by claiming the work would “enable fair treatment” of immigrants. This is in internal wiki pages obtained by 404 Media.

ICE is using ELITE to identify neighborhoods where lots of potential detainees might be located. Not individuals – clusters. Areas. The tool is designed for planning raids.

The confidence score is the detail that makes this science fiction. Some algorithm assigning a percentage to how certain it is about where you sleep at night.

Stephen Miller – Trump’s chief immigration policy architect – held up to $250,000 in Palantir stock until he and his wife sold it in August 2025. The guy designing the deportation policy was invested in the company building the deportation infrastructure.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has hired multiple former Palantir employees. They’re working on centralizing immigrant data from across the government into what Wired describes as a “master database.” Wired and CNN reported that Palantir is the contractor making that happen – Palantir denied it.

The technology isn’t theoretical. It’s deployed. ICE agents are using ELITE right now. Palantir delivered the ImmigrationOS prototype in September 2025 – six months after signing the contract. That’s the rush timeline ICE used to justify not seeking competitive bids.

Paul Graham – Y Combinator co-founder, prominent Silicon Valley investor – called Palantir out on X, saying they’re “building the infrastructure of the police state.”

Palantir’s response? Their global head of commercial posted that new Palantir hires should “expect to weather attacks like this all the time.”

They’re marketing this as nonpartisan. They point to contracts under Obama and Biden. But the scale has changed. Under Trump, Palantir isn’t just managing databases – they’re building targeting systems for mass deportation.

Civil liberties groups are sounding alarms. Calli Schroeder from the Electronic Privacy Information Center looked at screenshots of the procurement records and said Palantir’s engagement with ICE is “facilitating and enabling abuses and violation of rights – rights like due process which, I want to note, extend to all in the US, regardless of citizenship status.”

The American Immigration Council notes that systems like ImmigrationOS pose risks to the general public because it’s unclear how they’d be limited only to people here illegally. Such systems could easily expand to target any American.

Palantir argues they’re just providing tools. They don’t decide who gets targeted. But design choices shape outcomes. AI architecture becomes policy. The company deciding what data gets integrated, how confidence scores get calculated, which fields agents see first – those decisions determine who gets arrested.

This is how surveillance states get built. Not overnight with some dramatic announcement. Quietly. Through contracts. “Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement” sounds bureaucratic. Clinical. It’s a deportation coordination platform. Call it that.

404 Media got the leaked internal messages and says they show Palantir’s work with ICE includes “producing leads for law enforcement to find people to deport and keeping track of the logistics of Trump’s mass deportation effort.”

Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem told ICE to arrest 3,000 people per day. That’s the target. ELITE and ImmigrationOS are the tools making that scale possible. You can’t manually identify and track 3,000 targets daily. You need automation. Algorithms. A system that ingests massive datasets and spits out names and addresses.

More than 70% of people held in ICE detention have no criminal conviction. Many have legal status. The “worst of the worst” rhetoric doesn’t match the enforcement reality. And the enforcement reality runs on Palantir’s software.

Peter Thiel co-founded PayPal with Elon Musk. Both are now deeply embedded in this administration. Musk running DOGE. Thiel’s network filling appointee positions. David Sacks – AI and crypto czar. Jim O’Neill – deputy HHS secretary. Jacob Helberg – Under Secretary of State. All Thiel connections.

This is oligarchy with a tech bro aesthetic. Wearing Patagonia vests instead of suits. Talking about disruption instead of lobbying. But it’s the same thing – wealth converting into power converting into more wealth.

Palantir’s stock hitting 200% gains since Trump’s election isn’t coincidental. It’s investors recognizing that having your co-founder’s protégé as VP while some of your highest-profile contracts are immigration enforcement is good for business.

The difference now is the technology. Past deportation operations required physical surveillance. With ELITE, you open an app. See the target. Check the confidence score. Decide if it’s worth the raid. You can process hundreds of potential enforcement actions before breakfast. That’s the efficiency.

The map interface makes it visual. Gamified. Less “we’re separating families” and more “we’re optimizing operations.” The distance the technology creates between decision and consequence is the point.

An ICE agent looking at a face on a screen, reading a confidence score, clicking “yes” or “no” – that’s easier than standing on someone’s doorstep watching their kids through the window. The app mediates. Makes it abstract. Professional.

The language does so much work here. “Enhanced Leads Identification.” “Targeting for Enforcement.” “Immigration Lifecycle Operating System.” Everything sounds like IT infrastructure. Boring enterprise software.

It’s a deportation coordination platform. Call it that.

This is the system Peter Thiel’s empire built. The seeing stone that watches everyone. Fed by government databases most of us never realized would talk to each other. Outputting intelligence ICE uses to choose who gets arrested today.

The receipts are public. The contracts are documented. The internal messages are leaked. The former employees are speaking out. This isn’t hidden.

It’s just boring enough that most people won’t pay attention until someone they know gets tagged by ELITE’s algorithm. Gets assigned a confidence score. Shows up on an agent’s map.

By then the infrastructure is built. The databases are integrated. The system is running. And Palantir has already moved on to the next contract.

Sources

Correction, September 27th, 2026: This essay first said Stephen Miller holds a big stake in Palantir – he and his wife sold their Palantir stock, worth up to $250,000, in August 2025. It also credited Alex Karp with words that come from Palantir’s internal wiki, called 404 Media’s description of leaked messages Palantir’s own words, called immigration enforcement Palantir’s biggest contracts when its military deals are far bigger, and cut words out of Calli Schroeder’s quote without marking it.

Update, September 27th, 2026: A few lines now say who says so or add the missing detail – where Thiel’s $15 million went, when Vance went to Mar-a-Lago, who set the 3,000-a-day arrest goal, and what the 70% figure counts.

Everything I have written about AI is in one place at rachelandthecity.com/the-ai-files.

The deportation tech stack is here. Confidence scores on human beings and all.

Sources

Share this: