President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement is about to get a high-powered boost as Elon Musk’s DOGE goons are tinkering away on a “master database” to speed up the identification, detention, and deportation of undocumented migrants, CNN has reported.
The project is mining sensitive data from across various federal government departments—including the IRS, Social Security Administration, and Health and Human Services—with help from Palantir Technologies, the controversial Silicon Valley data analytics firm co-founded by Trump ally Peter Thiel.
Sources who spoke with CNN under anonymity describe it as an unprecedented attempt to centralize personal information from multiple agencies into a single source. Officials say the aim is to generate rapid “targeting lists” for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations. Critics, however, warn it could amount to a civil liberties disaster.
“If they are designing a deportation machine, they will be able to do that,” a former senior IRS employee told CNN.
The project, which appears to have sidestepped many of the traditional safeguards, has alarmed Democratic lawmakers and privacy advocates. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) accused DOGE of “rapidly, haphazardly, and unlawfully” combining databases without proper oversight, warning that U.S. citizens’ personal and financial data could be swept up and misused.
“They’re going to take the information we already have and put it into a system,” a Trump administration official told CNN of their plans. “It will be able to rapidly queue information. Everyone is converting to Palantir.”
A federal judge is set to rule in May on whether to block the sharing of IRS data with ICE after an agreement on data-sharing between the departments was signed at the start of April. Meanwhile, legal battles are mounting over DOGE’s broader cross-agency data grabs, including access to immigration status databases held by the SSA.
Trump, when asked by TIME whether the database would be used for immigration enforcement, answered “not that I know of.” Yet public documents suggest otherwise: Palantir’s contract with DHS explicitly covers “streamlining selection and apprehension operations of illegal aliens.”
The database marks a dramatic escalation in the Trump administration’s migrant crackdown and a potentially dangerous expansion of executive power over Americans’ most sensitive data.
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