As millions of Americans contended with the freeze on SNAP payments during the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, the Trump Administration continued to ramp up funding for its campaign of mass deportation.
Publicly available documentation shows millions in new federal contracts for Palantir, the software company helping the administration target, detain and deport immigrants.
On September 19, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) exercised a $19 million option to add on to its existing Palantir contract to enhance and support its Investigative Case Management System. A week later, it announced a supplemental agreement to its contract—totaling $30 million—for enhancing the prototype of its ImmigrationOS system to better track, target, and detain immigrants. The next day, ICE awarded Palantir another $2 million supplement to its’ ongoing contract with the company.
ICE was making sure that even with the government shut down, its’ deportation arm could continue full speed ahead.
Yes, some of these software enhancements will be used by ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Unit to support its’ legitimate mission of combating drug and human trafficking by cartels. But it is just as clear that ICE’s enhanced ImmigrationOS and Investigative Case Management capabilities will increasingly be used to target immigrants who are not criminals, including those who dare to criticize government policy.
Syracuse University geographer, Austin Kocher, a national leader in analyzing trends in immigration enforcement, has reported that ICE arrests increased from 12,000 per month in January 2025—at the end of the Biden administration—to 30,000 per month in September. By September almost half of the detained immigrants were non-criminals.
The non-criminal ICE detainees include many who were lawfully present in the U.S. such as backlogged applicants for U visas (for victims or observers of crimes who had helped law enforcement with prosecutions), backlogged applicants for T visas (victims of human trafficking), backlogged asylum applicants, other immigrant litigants subjected to expedited removal without due process, and DACA recipients.
There is no tabulation of the extent to which Palantir or other vendors’ software technology has been used to target, track, and detain specific individuals, but reporting shows how ICE has used the technology to track individual air travel, driver’s license scans and cell phone records, among other pieces of data.
Immigrants living and working in the U.S. legally as a result of securing Temporary Protected Status (TPS) are among the sub-groups of immigrants with “fragile” status who may well be the most serious victims of weaponized data intrusion. This is because they are in the USCIS system but may overnight become unauthorized because of an arbitrary decision to revoke their status and work authorization.
For example, almost 9,000 Afghans had their TPS status revoked in July due to Homeland Security inexplicably determining in April that country conditions within Afghanistan had improved so they should return. Reporting from Human Rights Watch shows that more than half the country’s population is in need of food aid as rights for women and minorities continue to erode.
Among Afghan TPS recipients are those who fled in 2021 amid the U.S. withdrawal because they had worked with U.S. and/or international agencies to promote democracy or served as translators in military operations against the Taliban takeover of their home country.
By triangulating data from multiple sources and using Palantir’s AI technology, ICE can now much more easily target and track any of these Afghans—alongside Haitians, Venezuelans, South Sudanese and other groups suddenly criminalized by arbitrary revocation of their status.
It remains unclear what enhancements Palantir will add with the new infusion of federal dollars, and through these, what new troves of personal information—in addition to MedicAid, SNAP, IRS, and SSA data—will be made available to the Department of Homeland Security. What is certain is that they will lead almost certainly to more state and commercial databases being made accessible to target and track anyone, immigrant or otherwise.
One example is the Department of Labor’s recent attempt to access individual records from the federal-state unemployment insurance system.
“This should be ringing alarm bells,” Quinn Anex-Ries, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told one outlet, noting the effort comes against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s “pretty sprawling efforts to amass large quantities of information about everyday Americans … largely under the guise of preventing quote, unquote fraud, waste and abuse, but as we’ve seen, it’s been repurposed to fuel surveillance and immigration enforcement.”
The eventual outcomes of these multiple Trump administration efforts to access confidential personally identifiable data under authority of the Executive Orders on “Eliminating Waste Fraud and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos” and “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” is still unclear, largely because they have often been rebuffed by federal judges.
Still, litigation continues, though the Supreme Court majority has tended to rubber stamp assertions of executive authority.
In the meantime, as SNAP payments resume following the end of the shutdown, the message from the administration could not be more clear: it prioritizes targeting immigrants rather than feeding families.
This story has been updated to reflect the latest news regarding the end of the shutdown and resumption of SNAP payments.
