United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement is leveraging Palantir’s generative artificial intelligence tools to sort and summarize immigration enforcement tips from its public submission form, according to an inventory released Wednesday of all use cases the Department of Homeland Security had for AI in 2025.
The AI Enhanced ICE Tip Processing service is intended to help ICE investigators “to more quickly identify and action tips” for urgent cases, as well as translate submissions not made in English, according to the inventory. It also provides a “BLUF,” defined as a “high-level summary of the tip,” produced using at least one large language model. BLUF, or “bottom line up front,” is a military term that’s also used internally by some Palantir employees.
DHS says that the software is “being actively authorized” in support of ICE operations, adding that the tool helps reduce the “time-consuming manual effort required to review and categorize incoming tips.” The date when the AI-enhanced tip processing “became operational” is listed in the inventory as May 2, 2025.
The DHS inventory does not provide many details about the large language models Palantir uses to generate the BLUFs; however, it does note that ICE uses “commercially available large language models” that were “trained on the public domain data by their providers.”
“There was no additional training using agency data on top of what is available in the models’ base set of capabilities,” the inventory also notes. “During operation, the AI models interact with tip submissions.”
The “2025 DHS AI Use Case Inventory,” published Wednesday on DHS’s website, has been published for every year since 2022. The 2024 version of the inventory does not mention using AI to process tip line submissions.
Palantir has been a major ICE contractor since 2011, and it provides a sweeping set of analytical tools for the agency. Until now, however, almost nothing has been known about Palantir’s work processing tips for ICE.
This work was mentioned once in the description of a $1.96 million Palantir payment that ICE made in September 2025. The payment was to modify the Investigative Case Management System (ICM)—a version of Palantir’s off-the-shelf law enforcement product, Gotham, which stores information about current or former ICE investigations—to include the “Tipline and Investigative Leads Suite.”
The description includes no other details about Palantir’s work on this “Tipline” integration.
However, the “AI Enhanced ICE Tip Processing” tool may be an update to the “FALCON Tipline,” which replaced ICE’s previous tip-processing system around 2012.
Palantir, ICE, and DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
According to a DHS document last updated in 2021, the FALCON Tipline processes tips submitted by the public or law enforcement agencies about “suspected illegal activity” or “suspicious activity” to ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Tipline Unit. ICE appears to have only one tip line, but submissions can be made online or over the phone.
An entry to a federal register in December 2025 notes that when HSI receives a tip, investigators within its Tipline Unit conduct “queries” across various “DHS, law enforcement, and immigration databases.” After analyzing these results, HSI agents write “investigative reports” and then refer tips to the appropriate offices within DHS. It’s unclear exactly how much of this workflow may be assisted by the newly AI-enhanced processing.
Data from the FALCON Tipline, Palantir’s ICM, and several other databases are ingested and made searchable by the FALCON Search & Analysis System, a separate but similarly named tool also developed by Palantir.
After federal agents shot and killed Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti on Saturday, Palantir workers pressed leadership for answers on the company’s work with ICE. In Slack messages, reviewed by WIRED this week, workers asked whether Palantir could “put any pressure on ICE at all.” One worker wrote, “Our involvement with ice has been internally swept under the rug under Trump2 too much. We need an understanding of our involvement here.”
Responding to this pressure, leadership updated Palantir’s internal wiki detailing its ongoing work with ICE. In a post from January 24, Akash Jain, whose LinkedIn profile lists him as chief technology officer and president of Palantir USG, defended the company’s work with ICE, writing that Palantir’s services improve “ICE’s operational effectiveness.”
“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 updated wiki describes Palantir’s work with ICE as focusing on three major areas: “Enforcement Operations Prioritization and Targeting,” “Self-Deportation Tracking,” and “Immigration Lifestyle Operations focused on logistics planning and execution.” But it does not mention any use of AI to help immigration enforcement officials sort through potential tips.
The inventory released by ICE on Wednesday also references another Palantir-developed tool called Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) which was first reported by 404 Media earlier this month. ELITE creates maps outlining potential deportation targets and presents information dossiers on each person. The tool pulls data from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to identify addresses for potential targets. The tool became operational in June, according to the inventory, and 404 Media reports that it has been used in Oregon.
“While ELITE provides actionable data to ERO (Enforcement and Removal Operations) officers, its outputs are limited to normalized address data and do not serve as a principal basis for decisions or actions with legal, material, binding, or significant effects on individuals,” the inventory reads. “ICE data was not used during the design, development, or training phases of the AI models. During operation, the AI models interact with ICE production data from multiple sources, including data from ICE’s Enforcement Integrated Database (EID).”
ICE and the White House have repeatedly linked out to the agency’s webform for tips over the past year, calling on the public—not just law enforcement—to submit possible leads. “Help ICE officers make your community safer by reporting suspicious activity,” said one ICE post on X from February.
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