It began in 2011, when Palantir embedded itself within Homeland Security Investigations, supplying DHS with tools to track flights, scan driver’s license data, and map human movement through cell phone records. This was before data mining had a name, and decades before the public understood that their private lives were being fused into searchable systems.

Even now — for many — that understanding has never really arrived.

In 2014, ICE first contracted with Palantir Technologies. This contract gave them $41 million to build ICE an ‘Investigative Case Management’ (ICM) system. That decision cemented what is now a fifteen-year relationship, one that has survived multiple presidencies, and has been alive nearly long enough to vote.

In 2025, ICE had extended partnership with a $159 million dollar contract to use Palantirs ‘modernization’ to ICM called ImmigrationOS. And in the name of modernization, documents released in January 2026 reveal that the agency treated government bidding requirements as optional and declared Palantir the only viable option.

This is despite another company — Kaseware — who met the requirements and wanted the contract and wanted to bid against Palantir for it. Kaseware went as far as filing a complaint with the GAO about Palantir being awarded this contract, but it was dismissed.

And it is so important to understand what that control actually means. ICM is the central nervous system of ICE operations. It is the architecture that analyzes, connects, and feeds the data powering DHS’s totalitarianism that is bleeding in our communities.

ICM knows the shape of your face better than your own mother did. It knows where you buy groceries, places you’ve drove your car, where you work and pay taxes, and even who you call at night. And it doesn't just watch, it predicts, allowing the government to calculate 'confidence scores' of where you are at any given time.

It uses emergency Medicaid data — the same data Attorney General Pam Bondi is attempting to extort out of Minnesota — emergency insurance used to save lives now used to hunt families. It creates networks of who you know, and then who they know.

ICE and Palantir have stripped you bare without ever touching you. We are not people to them. We were just puzzles they had already solved.

After fifteen years of a relationship, the question becomes unavoidable. Was this monopoly of the surveillance state given to them because of loyalty to Palantir, or does DHS fear what might be exposed if another company saw their records?

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