President Donald Trump has set a goal of deporting 1 million people annually, and the new system aims to help prioritize who gets targeted.
IRS agrees to share tax information to help Trump’s deportation plans
The IRS will share taxpayer information, including addresses, with Homeland Security to assist in locating undocumented immigrants.
DENVER ‒ Federal officials are building a sprawling new database system they’re calling “ImmigrationOS” to track and target millions of people living illegally in the United States
A $30 million no-bid contract with GOP megadonor Peter Thiel’s Palantir Technologies will help Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents build a sophisticated system to prioritize people for deportation, including accused gang members and people who have overstayed their tourist visas. The contract with the Denver-based company calls for rolling out a prototype this fall.
Thiel, the founder and chairman of Palantir, is close to Vice President JD Vance and DOGE head Elon Musk, with whom he launched PayPal.
The ImmigrationOS project reflects the approach DOGE has brought to the federal bureaucracy under Trump, as Musk’s deputies seek technology-focused solutions to make government more efficient. Palantir already runs the ICE system used for Homeland Security investigations, and the new ImmigrationOS will merge data from multiple databases from the government and private sources.
“These transnational organizations’ ongoing campaigns of violence and terror in the United States and internationally are extraordinarily violent, vicious, and similarly threaten the American people,” ICE officials said in justifying the no-bid contract with Palantir. “They present an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”
Palantir’s existing contract with ICE has already topped $88 million, and the new ImmigrationOS system will cost another $30 million, according to contract details reviewed by USA TODAY. Several of Musk’s DOGE deputies have previously worked at Palantir, according to postings on LinkedIn and other social media sites.
The system will also track people who “self deport” or leave the United States voluntarily, to help prioritize ICE enforcement against those who remain. Trump wants to deport 1 million people annually, a dramatic increase requiring a vast, sophisticated and expensive targeting, detention and removal operation.
System could be repurposed to track Americans
Civil liberties groups warn systems like ImmigrationOS pose significant risks to the general public, in part because it’s unclear how the system would be limited only to people living illegally in the United States. Such a system, they warn, could easily be expanded to target any American.
Trump has suggested that he wants to remove not just immigrants but U.S. citizens if they’re deemed dangerous, and said he’s ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate.
Cooper Quintin, a senior staff technologist with Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group, said Palantir’s work has long raised concerns by so effectively collating public databases with things like Facebook tracking and even shopper reward cards.
While the federal government collects and retains vast quantities of information about individual Americans, the computer databases have typically been kept separate from each other to preserve personal privacy. In April, USA TODAY reported that the IRS had agreed to give ICE agents access to taxpayer data, including data about people who filed taxes without a Social Security number,
ICE agents could use ImmigrationOS to figure out where a targeted person lives and works, when they’re likely to be home, who they live with, the kind of car they drive and even what restaurants or shops they frequent.
Quintin said a system designed to target people living illegally in the United States could easily be repurposed to target the president’s political enemies.
“What they have built is a really, really capable engine for analyzing big data, linking it together and picking out parts of it. That gives you the ability to collate this data on somebody and go looking for a reason to prosecute them,” Quintin said. “Even if you think you’re safe for now, you might not be safe for long.”