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.”
