Medical records, predictive surveillance, and the privatization of immigration enforcement
As deadly Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids continue across the United States, one private corporation remains central to how deportation is carried out in practice: Palantir Technologies.
While public officials debate immigration policy and federal agencies deflect responsibility, Palantir’s software does the operational work — aggregating sensitive data, assigning confidence scores, and converting human lives into enforcement targets.
ELITE: The Engine Behind ICE Operations
ICE relies on Palantir’s Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) platform to identify, locate, and prioritize individuals for arrest and removal.
ELITE fuses data from multiple federal sources, including:
Department of Health and Human Services
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
Immigration courts
Other government and commercial datasets
The system generates dossiers on individuals and assigns probabilistic scores estimating whether a person is currently at a specific location, how many people may be present, and whether the target qualifies as “high value.”
ICE officers have acknowledged in court that ELITE directly informs raid planning. This is not administrative software — it is operational enforcement infrastructure.
Health Data as a Weaponized Input
Among the most disturbing elements of Palantir’s role is its use of address information derived from health-related records — data originally collected for medical care, social services, or public health purposes.
That information is repurposed into immigration enforcement intelligence without patient consent, judicial oversight, or meaningful public disclosure.
The result is a collapsed boundary between healthcare and law enforcement — one that risks deterring vulnerable populations from seeking medical care at all.
The People Behind Palantir
Palantir’s reach is not accidental. It is shaped by a small group of founders and controlling figures who retain extraordinary influence over the company’s direction.
Peter Thiel
Role: Co-founder, Chairman, largest individual shareholder
Nationality: United States (born in Germany, naturalized American)
Marital status: Married to Matt Danzeisen
Background: Billionaire investor and political financier
Thiel has openly argued that democracy and freedom are incompatible — a worldview reflected in Palantir’s comfort with mass surveillance, predictive enforcement, and opaque government power.
Alex Karp
Role: Co-founder, Chief Executive Officer
Nationality: United States
Marital status: Not publicly married
Background: Philosopher-turned-executive, vocal defender of Palantir’s work with ICE, the military, and intelligence agencies
Karp has dismissed civil liberties criticism as naïve and has embraced militarized rhetoric to justify Palantir’s expanding role in enforcement and warfare.
Stephen Cohen
Role: Co-founder, President
Nationality: United States
Marital status: Not a central feature of his public profile
Background: Former Palantir CEO, architect of the company’s internal governance and government contracting strategy
Stephen Cohen is often less visible than Thiel or Karp, but his influence is structural. He played a key role in building Palantir’s long-term relationships with U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies and has defended the company’s close integration with federal enforcement operations.
Together, Thiel, Karp, and Cohen retain disproportionate control over Palantir’s culture, priorities, and willingness to embed deeply inside government agencies while avoiding public accountability.
A Longstanding Relationship With ICE
Palantir has worked with ICE since at least 2014. That relationship intensified during the Trump administration but did not end with it.
Despite public outrage over family separations, detention deaths, and aggressive raids, Palantir’s contracts continued under subsequent administrations — shielded by national security justifications and procurement opacity.
The political leadership changed.
The deportation machinery did not.
A Privatized Enforcement State
Palantir represents a fundamental shift in how power is exercised in the United States:
Immigration enforcement is increasingly outsourced
Surveillance is privatized
Accountability is diffused across algorithms, contracts, and corporate secrecy
When raids result in injury or death, responsibility is fragmented.
When errors occur, no single actor is accountable.
That is not a flaw — it is the design.
The Bottom Line
Palantir does not knock on doors.
Palantir does not place people in handcuffs.
But ICE cannot operate at scale without Palantir’s systems.
A private, profit-driven corporation now:
mines sensitive personal data
predicts human behavior
guides armed federal agents to people’s homes
All while operating largely beyond public scrutiny.
If Americans are disturbed by what they see in ICE raids, they must confront the infrastructure behind them — because by the time agents arrive, the decision has already been made by an algorithm and once they stop with immigration they could come for you if you don't confirm. George Orwell's novel 1984 is here.
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