Immigration Surveillance

In September 2025, reporting revealed that the tech company Palantir had won a contract to build a tool called ImmigrationOS, which was designed to track immigration and deportation. This was followed more recently by reports the company is building another tool named ELITE to help ICE map the addresses of people to arrest for deportation. We know these products exist because they were federal procurements, which are public in nature. What we don’t know as clearly is all the work that DOGE has been doing to make these system viable. These projects work by combining data sourced from federal data systems at the IRS and Medicaid and Social Security Administration, as well as other data purchased from data brokers to give a “god’s eye” view of anybody who could be targeted by ICE. This nightmare scenario is exactly what The Privacy Act of 1974 was passed to prevent. But DOGE has generally operated as if the Privacy Act does not exist, and its missteps in identify fraud don’t inspire confidence that they won’t make egregious errors in trying to combine information from various systems that were not meant to be used this way. These errors will be compounded as DOGE also tries to incorporate election data into its systems and push wider use of SAVE as a verification tool. There have been efforts to slow this unholy conglomeration in the courts. Agency staff have protested the illegality of data sharing, usually to be suspended and side-lined. Challenges in the courts have had some success, but have been countered by the Supreme Court. Ultimately, it will be up to Congress to eventually rein in these abuses, and by then they’ll have harmed countless lives.