Palantir does not sell a facial recognition product. What Palantir sells to Immigration and Customs Enforcement are the data platforms that face-match results flow into, alongside address records, tax files, license plate reads, phone data, and Medicaid rolls. So when people ask about Palantir facial recognition, the accurate picture is a company whose software sits one layer above the cameras and the matching algorithms, stitching their outputs together with everything else the government knows about a person. The face-recognition engines themselves come from other vendors, chiefly Clearview AI, and from a DHS smartphone app called Mobile Fortify.1American Immigration Council. ICE Uses AI in Immigration Enforcement Surveillance
What Palantir Actually Builds for ICE
Palantir’s flagship government product, Gotham, ingests data objects representing people, places, things, and events and maps the relationships between them, letting analysts run semantic, temporal, geospatial, and full-text searches across records that would otherwise sit in separate silos.2Taylor & Francis Online. Palantir Gotham Analysis
For ICE, Palantir built the Investigative Case Management system, in place since 2014, which pulls in data from the FBI, DEA, ATF, the student and exchange visitor tracking system, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the commercial data broker product CLEAR from Thomson Reuters. It also holds information agents upload from field operations, including data extracted from phones seized at the border or during arrests. The platform lists “biometric traits” among its data categories, though the precise types it handles, and whether Clearview face-match outputs are stored or queryable inside it, has not been publicly confirmed.3ACLU. Palantir Deportation Roundup
Two newer tools have drawn the most scrutiny. ELITE — Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement — populates a map with potential deportation targets and generates a dossier for each person that includes name, photograph, date of birth, Alien number, and full address, along with an “address confidence score” reflecting how likely the person actually lives there.4404 Media. ELITE: The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid5Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. USA: Palantir’s Surveillance Tech Allegedly Fuels Indiscriminate and Violent ICE Operations ICE uses ELITE to identify geographic areas where high numbers of people with an “immigration nexus” are concentrated — a term the agency defines broadly enough to include naturalized U.S. citizens.3ACLU. Palantir Deportation Roundup
A January 2026 Electronic Frontier Foundation report revealed that ELITE ingests address data from the Department of Health and Human Services, including Medicaid records.6EFF. Report: ICE Using Palantir Tool That Feeds on Medicaid Data Fortune reported that ICE and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services signed a data-sharing agreement granting ICE access to the personal data of nearly 80 million Medicaid patients.7Fortune. ICE Allegedly Uses Palantir Tool Tracking Medicaid Data The EFF called the arrangement a “de facto dragnet” and a “throwback to the rightly mocked ‘Total Information Awareness’ plans of the early 2000s.”
The second major tool is ImmigrationOS. ICE awarded Palantir a $30 million contract in April 2025 to build the platform, designed to prioritize individuals for apprehension, track “self-deportation” in near real time, and manage the logistics of removal. A prototype was due September 25, 2025, with the contract running through September 2027.3ACLU. Palantir Deportation Roundup ImmigrationOS aggregates passport records, Social Security files, IRS tax data, and license plate reader data.8American Immigration Council. ICE ImmigrationOS: Palantir AI to Track Immigrants The ACLU calculated that Palantir’s sole-source relationship with ICE has exceeded $145 million. In February 2026, DHS and Palantir signed a five-year blanket purchase agreement worth up to $1 billion, letting ICE, CBP, and potentially the Secret Service, FEMA, TSA, and CISA buy Palantir services without competitive bidding.9Wired. Department of Homeland Security ICE Billion Dollar Agreement Palantir
The Facial Recognition Tools That Plug In
The face-matching itself is done by two separate systems.
Mobile Fortify is a DHS smartphone app that lets agents scan faces and fingerprints in the field, querying a database of roughly 200 million images drawn from federal and state records.10The Guardian. ICE Facial Recognition Minnesota According to a DHS document, ICE does not offer people the opportunity to decline or consent to the biometric collection the app performs.11CNN. ICE CBP Cellphones Minnesota Mobile Fortify DHS has used the app to scan faces and fingerprints more than 100,000 times, with deployment shifting from ports of entry to widespread mobile use.
Clearview AI is a commercial vendor that scrapes billions of publicly available images. In September 2025, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division entered a $9.2 million contract with Clearview AI giving access to a database of over 50 billion facial images.12Immigrant Defense Policy Tracking. Reported ICE Contracts With Clearview AI for Facial Recognition Technology An earlier ICE contract with Clearview, worth about $2.3 million for enterprise licenses, ran from 2021 to 2024.13USAspending.gov. Contract Award: Clearview Facial Recognition Enterprise Licenses
The American Immigration Council described what happens when these separate tools are used in combination. ICE relies on “large vendor-built platforms — such as Palantir’s comprehensive immigration systems, Clearview AI’s facial-recognition tools, BI2’s iris-scanning devices, and Paragon’s phone-hacking software — that pull together many different forms of data and analysis in one place.” Once fused into what the Council called a single “black box,” it becomes “increasingly unclear how someone was identified.”1American Immigration Council. ICE Uses AI in Immigration Enforcement Surveillance
How It Worked in Minnesota
The tools came together in Operation Metro Surge, a large-scale enforcement action launched in December 2025 that DHS described as its “largest immigration operation ever,” deploying thousands of federal agents to the Twin Cities over roughly three months.14Human Rights Watch. A Manufactured Crisis: Minnesota Communities Terrorized by the Federal Government
On January 10, 2026, in Richfield, Minnesota, an ICE agent used Mobile Fortify to identify Nicole Cleland, a legal observer monitoring an enforcement operation. The agent told Cleland he was “recording her face” and documenting her identity for a “database of observers.” Three days later, Cleland’s Global Entry and TSA PreCheck privileges were revoked, which the ACLU of Minnesota characterized as unconstitutional retaliation for protected First Amendment activity.15KSTP. Watching the Watchers: ICE Uses Facial Recognition to Track Citizen Observers in Minnesota The New York Times reported that agents in the Minneapolis area were using facial recognition, social media monitoring, and other tools to identify and track not only undocumented immigrants but also protesters.16The New York Times. Tech ICE Facial Recognition Palantir
Human Rights Watch documented the broader operation in a June 2026 report: agents stopped, arrested, and detained thousands of people, including U.S. citizens, refugees, green card holders, and asylum applicants; nearly two out of three immigrants arrested had no prior U.S. criminal history; federal agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and a third Minneapolis resident was also shot.14Human Rights Watch. A Manufactured Crisis: Minnesota Communities Terrorized by the Federal Government 404 Media reported that immigration agents surrounded rideshare drivers and used pepper spray on high school students during the operation.4404 Media. ELITE: The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid Minnesota state officials announced in March 2026 the creation of a council to investigate the human rights impacts of the operation.
Legal Challenges and Congressional Pushback
Several lawsuits are now in motion. Illinois sued DHS in January 2026, alleging that the indiscriminate use of Mobile Fortify violated residents’ rights. The ACLU of Minnesota sued ICE over the Minnesota enforcement actions, alleging racial profiling and unconstitutional retaliation against observers. Democratic lawmakers introduced a bill to ban DHS from using Mobile Fortify except at ports of entry.10The Guardian. ICE Facial Recognition Minnesota The EFF filed an amicus brief in a multistate lawsuit, California v. HHS, seeking to block the disclosure of Medicaid enrollee data to ICE.17EFF. EFF to Court: Protect Our Health Data From DHS In February 2026, the DHS Inspector General launched an audit of how ICE and the Office of Biometric Identity Management collect, manage, share, and secure biometric data and personally identifiable information.18FedScoop. DHS ICE Data Sharing Gathering Warrantless Purchase
In April 2026, Representatives Dan Goldman and Nydia Velázquez and Senator Ron Wyden, joined by 30 other lawmakers, sent a letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and acting ICE Director Todd Lyons demanding answers to 11 categories of questions.19Rep. Dan Goldman. Goldman, Wyden, Velázquez Demand Answers on ICE Use of Palantir-Developed Technologies They sought an inventory of every database, analytics program, and application used for immigration enforcement; a full accounting of DHS contracts with Palantir since January 2020; details on facial recognition vendor contracts, data retention policies, and records of false positives; and disclosure of whether DHS had collected information on people peacefully observing or protesting immigration operations. The response deadline was April 24, 2026. Reporting by Wired and Biometric Update indicated no formal response had been received.20Biometric Update. Lawmakers Press DHS, ICE Over Palantir Surveillance Tools
The lawmakers pointed to a September 2023 DHS Inspector General report (OIG-23-61) that found CBP, ICE, and the Secret Service had violated federal law through the warrantless purchase and use of commercial location data. The IG found no department-wide policy, inadequate guardrails, shared accounts, and no supervisory review, and recommended that ICE discontinue using commercial telemetry data until privacy impact assessments were completed. As of March 2026, the recommendation to develop a department-wide policy remained open.18FedScoop. DHS ICE Data Sharing Gathering Warrantless Purchase
What Palantir Says
Palantir denies building a centralized surveillance database. Responding to the EFF report, the company said each software instance for government customers is “legally, technically, and operationally distinct,” described ELITE as a pilot program used for prioritized enforcement against individuals with final removal orders or serious criminal charges, and pointed to “indelible audit logs” that record all activity on its platforms.21Palantir Blog. Correcting the Record: Response to the EFF January 15, 2026 Report on Palantir
The company’s published AI ethics framework commits that “certain problems that simply should not avail themselves to AI interventions” — particularly those that “violate legal and community norms” — and cites the use of facial recognition to predict sexual orientation from facial features as an example of research it considers “morally, scientifically, and legally questionable.” Palantir advocates AI that “augments rather than replaces” human intelligence and emphasizes explainability and auditability.22Palantir. Palantir AI Ethics
Amnesty International has called on the company to “immediately cease” its work with deportation programs.3ACLU. Palantir Deportation Roundup Privacy International documented Palantir’s operations in over 150 countries and highlighted a 2020 statement by CEO Alex Karp acknowledging that Palantir develops tools “used to kill people.”23Privacy International. All Roads Lead to Palantir As of late January 2026, a public “No Tech for ICE” letter calling on tech firms to cancel ICE contracts had gathered 450 signatures from employees at Palantir, Google, OpenAI, and other companies.7Fortune. ICE Allegedly Uses Palantir Tool Tracking Medicaid Data
The distinction to hold onto is a narrow one, and it matters. Palantir does not appear to run the face-matching algorithms. It builds the environment in which a face match from Mobile Fortify or Clearview becomes one field in a dossier that also carries an address confidence score, a Medicaid record, a license plate hit, and a tax file — and in which an agent can filter a neighborhood on that combined data before knocking on a door.