After federal agents shot and killed Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti on Saturday, Palantir workers pressed for answers from leadership on the company’s work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—and many questioned whether Palantir should be involved with the agency at all. Leadership defended its work as in part improving “ICE’s operational effectiveness.”
Internal Slack messages reviewed by WIRED reveal growing frustration within Palantir over its relationship with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and in particular, ICE’s enforcement and investigations teams. In response, Palantir’s privacy and civil liberties team published an update to the company’s internal wiki detailing its work on federal immigration enforcement, arguing that the “technology is making a difference in mitigating risks while enabling targeted outcomes.”
In a Saturday thread on Slack discussing Pretti’s killing, Palantir workers questioned both the ethics and the business logic of continuing the company’s work with ICE.
“Our involvement with ice has been internally swept under the rug under Trump2 too much. We need an understanding of our involvement here,” one person wrote.
“Can Palantir put any pressure on ICE at all?” wrote another. “I’ve read stories of folks rounded up who were seeking asylum with no order to leave the country, no criminal record, and consistently check in with authorities. Literally no reason to be rounded up. Surely we aren’t helping do that?”
The discussion was held in a company-wide Slack channel dedicated to general world news coverage. The messages viewed by WIRED received dozens of “+1” emoji responses from other workers seemingly backing requests for more information about Palantir’s relationship with ICE. Palantir did not respond to requests for comment from WIRED.
On Sunday, Courtney Bowman, Palantir’s global director of privacy and civil liberties engineering, responded to the avalanche of employee questions by linking out to the company’s internal wiki describing its DHS and immigration enforcement contracts. The post—last updated, at the time WIRED reviewed it, on January 24 by Akash Jain, whose LinkedIn lists him as chief technology officer and president of Palantir USG, which works with US government agencies—says that in April 2025, Palantir began a six-month pilot supporting ICE in three major areas: “Enforcement Operations Prioritization and Targeting,” “Self-Deportation Tracking,” and “Immigration Lifecycle Operations focused on logistics planning and execution.”
Those functions align with a $30 million contract ICE awarded Palantir in April for a platform called ImmigrationOS. According to contracting information provided by DHS at the time, the system would give ICE “near real-time visibility” into people self-deporting and help the agency identify and select who to deport. According to Palantir’s wiki, the pilot for these services was renewed in September for an additional six-month period, and the self-deportation tracking “is being folded into the work on Enforcement Operations Prioritization and Targeting.”
Palantir has also started a new pilot with US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to assist officials “in identifying fraudulent benefit submissions,” the wiki says. The Trump administration has used allegations of fraud to justify increased ICE presence in cities like Minneapolis.
“There have been increasing, and increasingly visible, field operations focused on interior immigration enforcement that continue to attract attention to Palantir’s involvement with ICE,” the wiki says. “We believe that our work could have a real and positive impact on ICE enforcement operations by providing officers and agents with the data to make more precise, informed decisions. We are committed to giving our partners the best software for the job, while acknowledging the reputational risk we face when supporting immigration enforcement operations.”
The wiki acknowledges “increasing reporting around U.S. Citizens being swept up in enforcement action and held, as well as reports of racial profiling allegedly applied as pretense for the detention of some U.S. Citizens,” but argues that Palantir’s customers at ICE “remain committed to avoiding the unlawful/unnecessary targeting, apprehension, and detention of U.S. Citizens wherever and however possible.”
After Bowman linked out to the updated wiki on Slack on Sunday, some workers asked additional questions about the capabilities of Palantir’s products and services and whether ICE could use them beyond the scope of the company’s contracts. When one worker asked whether ICE could build its own workflows outside of the company’s contract, like pulling data from outside sources, the response was blunt: “Yes, we do not take the position of policing the use of our platform for every workflow,” Jain said. He acknowledged that Palantir builds in “strong controls,” but “that doesn’t mean there won’t be bad apples, mistakes or other issues that lead to adverse outcomes. Those have to be governed by the law and oversight mechanisms within the system—just like a commercial customer.”
Pulling data from outside sources, whether that be from other agencies or commercially available third-party data, would expand DHS’s ability to surveil migrants and citizens alike.
Palantir has been largely tight-lipped about its work with ICE over the last year, resulting in workers relying on news reports for information about what services the company is actually providing. That tension escalated over the weekend after Pretti’s killing with at least a dozen workers demanding more clarification.
On Friday, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein shared a video showing what appears to be an ICE agent scanning a legal observer’s car. When the observer asks why the agent is documenting their vehicle, the agent responds, saying, “We have a nice little database and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist. So have fun with that.” (This does not appear to be an isolated incident; according to a declaration filed last week in support of Minnesota’s lawsuit versus Kristi Noem, an ICE agent shattered a car window before detaining the two people inside, telling them their actions—honking the car horn to alert nearby bystanders to ICE’s presence—amounted to “domestic terrorism.”)
One Palantir worker posted the video into the company’s Slack on Sunday, asking leadership whether it was providing such a database to ICE. “Ack, I’m not tracking any database like this that were [sic] involved with/exists,” Jain replied.
The wiki says, “Palantir does not in any way enable ICE personnel to have direct or unfettered access to third-agency databases or datasets outside of those shared for specific operational purposes within the bounds of established data sharing agreements.” Over the last year, ICE has expanded its data-sharing with outside agencies, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Last April, WIRED reported that Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency was building a master database at DHS to track and surveil migrants, using data from agencies including the Social Security Administration and IRS.
Palantir did not respond to a request for comment on whether its software powers the database referenced in the video.
Palantir’s work with the federal government has grown significantly throughout President Donald Trump’s first year in office, as it has secured more than $900 million in federal contracts, according to The Hill. Beyond the company’s work in immigration enforcement and the US military, Palantir has also worked with the Internal Revenue Service to build a “mega API” for accessing internal agency records. Still, some workers are still critical of the work.
“In my opinion ICE are the bad guys. I am not proud that the company I enjoy so much working for is part of this,” a worker said in the thread discussing Pretti’s killing. “Thinking pragmatically: is the reputational damage we’re taking for being associated with them worth it? What if the next administration will be democratic and they cut all the contracts with us?
The post Palantir Defends Work With ICE to Staff Following Killing of Alex Pretti appeared first on Wired.
