“No different vendor might meet these timeframes of getting the infrastructure in place to fulfill this pressing requirement and ship a prototype in lower than six months,” ICE says within the doc.
ICE’s doc doesn’t specify the info sources Palantir would pull from to energy ImmigrationOS. Nevertheless, it says that Palantir might “configure” the case administration system that it has offered to ICE since 2014.
Palantir has executed work at varied different authorities companies as early as 2007. Except for ICE, it’s labored with the US Military, Air Drive, Navy, Inner Income Service, and Federal Bureau of Investigation. As reported by WIRED, Palantir is presently serving to Elon Musk’s so-called Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE) construct a model new “mega API” on the IRS that might seek for data throughout all of the totally different databases that the company maintains.
Final week, 404 Media reported {that a} current model of Palantir’s case administration system for ICE permits brokers to seek for individuals primarily based on “tons of of various, extremely particular classes,” together with how an individual entered the nation, their present authorized standing, and their nation of origin. It additionally contains an individual’s hair and eye colour, whether or not they have scars or tattoos, and their license plate reader information, which would offer detailed location information about the place that particular person travels by automobile.
These functionalities have been talked about in a authorities privateness evaluation revealed in 2016, and it’s not clear what new data might have been built-in into the case administration system over the previous 4 years.
This week’s $30 million award is an addition to an present Palantir contract penned in 2022, initially price about $17 million, for work on ICE’s case administration system. The company has elevated the worth of the contract 5 occasions previous to this month; the biggest was a $19 million improve in September 2023.
The contract’s ImmigrationOS replace was first documented on April 11 in a government-run database monitoring federal spending. The entry had a 248-character description of the change. The five-page doc ICE revealed Thursday, in the meantime, has a extra detailed description of Palantir’s anticipated providers for the company.
The contract replace comes because the Trump administration deputizes ICE and different authorities companies to drastically escalate the ways and scale of deportations from the US. In current weeks, immigration authorities have arrested and detained individuals with scholar visas and inexperienced playing cards, and deported a minimum of 238 individuals to a brutal megaprison in El Salvador, a few of whom haven’t been in a position to communicate with a lawyer or have due course of.
As a part of its efforts to push individuals to self-deport, DHS in late March revoked the momentary parole of greater than half one million individuals and demanded that they self-deport in a couple of month, regardless of having been granted authorization to stay within the US after fleeing harmful or unstable conditions in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela below the so-called “CHNV parole applications.”
Final week, the Social Safety Administration listed greater than 6,000 of those individuals as useless, a tactic meant to finish their monetary lives. DHS, in the meantime, despatched emails to an unknown variety of individuals declaring that their parole had been revoked, and demanding them to self-deport. A number of US residents, together with immigration attorneys, acquired the e-mail.
On Monday, a federal choose quickly blocked the Trump administration’s transfer to revoke the individuals’s authorization to stay within the US below the CHNV applications. White Home spokesperson Karoline Leavitt known as the choose’s ruling “rogue.”