The Algorithm at the Border

Somewhere in a windowless office in Burlington, Virginia, a Palantir analyst clicks through a dashboard that maps the daily movements of a 34-year-old Guatemalan woman living in Denver. She drives to work at 6:40 a.m. She drops her daughter at school at 7:55. She buys groceries at King Soopers on Thursdays. The analyst knows all of this not because anyone followed her, but because her cell phone did — and because a data broker sold the coordinates to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for a price that wouldn't cover her monthly rent.[1]

This is what immigration enforcement looks like now. Not agents kicking in doors. Not checkpoints on highways. An algorithm, fed by commercial data pipelines that treat every person in America — citizen or not — as a product to be tracked, scored, and sold.

Palantir's Golden Contract

Peter Thiel's Palantir Technologies has been ICE's most important technology partner for the better part of a decade. The company's Investigative Case Management (ICM) system — built under contracts now worth over $200 million — serves as the central nervous system of ICE's enforcement operations. ICM pulls data from more than a dozen federal agencies, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the State Department, and fuses it with commercial records into a single searchable interface.[2]

What makes ICM dangerous isn't just its scope — it's its granularity. Agents can map connections between people, addresses, phone numbers, vehicles, and financial accounts in seconds. A 2019 investigation by The Intercept revealed that ICM was being used to track the sponsors of unaccompanied migrant children — the relatives who volunteer to house kids released from government custody. After ICE started running sponsors through Palantir's system, referrals collapsed. Families stopped coming forward. Children stayed locked up longer.[3]

“Palantir didn't just give ICE a tool. They gave ICE an architecture — one that turns every interaction with the government into a potential deportation trigger.”
— Julie Mao, Just Futures Law

In 2019, when internal pressure mounted at Palantir over the ICE contracts, CEO Alex Karp responded with a letter to shareholders: the company would not walk away from government work. “We have chosen sides,” he wrote.[4] Palantir renewed its ICE contract in 2022. Its stock price has tripled since then.

Your Phone Is an Informant

The Fourth Amendment says the government needs a warrant to track your movements. But there's a workaround: buy the data instead. ICE has spent millions purchasing cell phone location data from commercial brokers like Venntel (now Gravy Analytics) and Babel Street, which harvest GPS coordinates from ordinary smartphone apps — weather apps, games, prayer apps, coupon clippers — and sell them in bulk to federal agencies.[5]

A 2020 Wall Street Journal investigation found that Venntel's data could track individual phones from Mexican border towns into the U.S. interior, providing ICE with a de facto surveillance network that no court had authorized.[6] The data isn't technically “identified” — it's tied to advertising IDs rather than names — but researchers have shown repeatedly that re-identification is trivial. A phone that sleeps at the same address every night and commutes to the same workplace every morning is not anonymous. It is a file.

In 2023, a federal court ruled that the Department of Homeland Security's warrantless purchase of location data likely violated the Fourth Amendment. DHS appealed. The purchases continued.[7]

The Social Media Dragnet

Since 2017, the State Department has required most visa applicants to hand over five years of social media handles.[8] But ICE goes further. The agency contracts with firms like Giant Oak and Babel Street to monitor the social media activity of immigrants already inside the country — scanning posts, connections, and sentiment for signals of “derogatory” information.

Giant Oak's GOST platform, used by ICE since at least 2020, applies machine learning to social media profiles and public records to generate risk assessments. The Brennan Center for Justice obtained documents showing that these assessments influenced decisions about who to detain, who to release, and who to prioritize for removal — with no transparency about how the algorithm weighted its inputs.[9]

A post in Arabic. A connection to someone who attended a protest. A check-in near a mosque. In the world of algorithmic immigration enforcement, any data point can become a deportation risk factor — and the person flagged will never know which one tipped the scale.

The Sanctuary Illusion

More than 200 cities and counties in the United States have adopted sanctuary policies — refusing to honor ICE detainers, limiting cooperation with federal immigration agents, or restricting local police from asking about immigration status. The policies were designed to build trust between immigrant communities and local government. But the data broker economy has made them largely symbolic.[10]

When an undocumented resident in a sanctuary city signs a lease, opens a utility account, registers a car, or enrolls a child in school, those records flow into commercial databases that ICE can query without ever contacting the city. A Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology report found that ICE had accessed driver's license databases in states that specifically granted licenses to undocumented immigrants — using the very ID programs designed to bring people out of the shadows to push them back in.[11]

“Sanctuary policies protect against one kind of data sharing — the direct kind, where a police officer calls ICE. They do nothing about the indirect kind, where a data broker sells your utility records to a federal contractor who feeds them into a deportation algorithm. That's the gap the entire system runs through.”
— Nina Wang, Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology

The Machine Has No Off Switch

What makes this system so durable is that it doesn't depend on any single policy or administration. The data broker contracts survive changes in the White House. The Palantir infrastructure is embedded too deeply to rip out. The commercial surveillance economy that feeds it all operates beyond the reach of immigration reform because it wasn't built for immigration — it was built to sell ads, and immigration enforcement just happens to be a paying customer.

Congress has introduced bills to regulate data brokers — the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act passed the House in 2024 but stalled in the Senate.[12] Until something like it becomes law, ICE will keep buying what the Constitution says it can't collect. The algorithm doesn't need a warrant. It needs a purchase order.

The woman in Denver is still driving to work at 6:40 a.m. Her phone is still broadcasting. Somewhere in Burlington, the dashboard is still updating.