At the height of President Donald Trump’s winter immigration enforcement surge in Minneapolis, a new AI-driven targeting application quietly appeared on the phones of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation officers. Built by Palantir — the CIA-backed data mining and artificial intelligence firm — the app, known as ELITE, or Enhanced Lead Identification and Targeting for Enforcement, was designed to identify immigrants for deportation, generate dossiers on targets, and assign each one a “confidence score” for address accuracy. What was not widely known at the time, however, was that thousands of newly hired ICE officers were accessing this powerful surveillance tool before their background checks had been completed.

The ELITE App: What It Does and Who Built It

Palantir’s ELITE system is, by any measure, a formidable piece of enforcement technology. According to its own user guide, obtained and reported on by 404 Media, the app populates a map interface with potential deportation targets, displaying names, photographs, Alien registration numbers, dates of birth, and address confidence scores. It draws on sensitive data from the Department of Health and Human Services — which includes Medicaid records — U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and CLEAR, a commercial data broker product sold by Thomson Reuters that aggregates vast amounts of personal information on individuals.

The system goes further than simply flagging individual targets. According to court testimony by ICE agents in Oregon, the app displays the number of people with an “immigration nexus” in particular locations — a definition broad enough to include naturalized U.S. citizens who have had any dealings with an immigration agency. ICE has used this geospatial intelligence to identify what internal parlance describes as “target rich” areas, locations where officers can efficiently locate and detain the largest number of people in order to meet deportation quotas.

The ACLU, which has tracked Palantir since at least 2011, has noted that Amnesty International called on the company to “immediately cease their work” with the Trump deportation program under United Nations human rights principles. Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor Palantir responded to requests for comment from The Intercept.

A Hiring Surge Without the Vetting

To understand how uncleared officers ended up with access to one of the most sensitive targeting tools in federal law enforcement, one must trace the origins of ICE’s rapid expansion. ICE added over 12,000 employees through an expedited hiring surge, according to reporting by Government Executive. The agency, under pressure to accelerate deportation operations, simultaneously cut portions of its training curriculum, according to prior Intercept reporting. In early 2026, Reuters reported that thousands of the new ICE hires were deployed to the streets without completed background checks.

Into this environment, ELITE was introduced. According to five ICE officials who spoke to The Intercept — each working in different regions across the country — every ICE deportation officer is issued a phone on which the ELITE app comes as a standard installation. That means new hires, including those whose background investigations remained incomplete, were handed direct access to an application aggregating sensitive government data on individuals from multiple federal agencies.

“It’s one of the first applications they give new officers so they can start working,” one ICE deportation officer who came through the hiring surge told The Intercept, speaking anonymously to protect their livelihood. “You can access it without full background clearance.”

The five ICE officials further confirmed that deportation officers without completed background checks continue to work in all of their jurisdictions, with some of those officers having been hired nearly a year prior to the reporting.

Whistleblowers and Former Officials Sound the Alarm

The combination of unvetted personnel and unrestricted access to a powerful AI-driven surveillance platform has prompted serious concern among current ICE officers, former DHS officials, and legal experts.

Mary Ellen Callahan, former chief of staff to the deputy secretary of Homeland Security, offered a direct assessment. “No one should have been hired by DHS before background reviews were completed. This never happened in previous administrations,” she told The Intercept. “Furthermore, giving the newly hired ICE ERO staff access to sensitive databases such as ELITE threatens public safety by allowing non-vetted teams to access and potentially misuse data.”

Callahan also noted that the ELITE app did not go through the standard review process that government tools ordinarily undergo to prevent abuses and protect privacy rights — a process designed precisely to create accountability before sensitive systems are deployed in the field.

One current ICE deportation officer was more blunt: “Some of these guys should’ve never been hired, let alone have access to the information on ELITE.”

A Broader Pattern of Data Consolidation

The civil liberties implications extend beyond the question of individual officer vetting. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which sought last year to block the federal government from using Medicaid data to identify and deport immigrants, warned about the dangers of consolidating all government information into a single AI-driven interface. “Different government agencies necessarily collect information to provide essential services or collect taxes,” EFF wrote, “but the danger comes when the government begins pooling that data and using it for reasons unrelated to the purpose it was collected.”

EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn drew a direct comparison to the Total Information Awareness program of the early 2000s, which was publicly shelved following a massive public outcry and congressional pushback. The current architecture — a single searchable, AI-enhanced interface fed by health data, immigration records, and commercial data broker files — represents, critics argue, a more sophisticated and less publicly scrutinized version of that same concept.

Palantir’s role in this infrastructure is not incidental. The company, which has historical ties to the CIA through its early investment backing, has built a suite of tools that are now deeply integrated into U.S. domestic enforcement. Beyond ELITE, Palantir’s involvement in federal contracting now spans immigration enforcement, tax data analysis, and predictive policing initiatives at the local level. The ACLU has documented the company’s role in a New Orleans predictive policing database that incorporated “threat scores” for individuals — a precursor to the confidence-score model now deployed in immigration enforcement.

The Question of Oversight and Accountability

What the reporting from The Intercept and corroborating sources reveals is not merely a procedural lapse. It describes a system in which the normal checks designed to protect both civil liberties and national security — background investigations, privacy impact assessments, technology review processes — were bypassed in the name of operational speed.

The risks are twofold. On the civil liberties side, an application that aggregates Medicaid data, immigration records, commercial data broker information, and geospatial targeting data, placed in the hands of officers who have not been fully vetted, creates clear potential for misuse of sensitive personal information. On the national security side, uncleared personnel with access to databases drawing on multiple federal agencies represents a counterintelligence vulnerability that former DHS officials describe as without precedent in recent administrations.

The five regional ICE officials who spoke to The Intercept confirmed that this situation is not confined to one field office or one city — it is present across their jurisdictions, and the officers operating without cleared background checks continue to work and, by extension, continue to access ELITE.

What Comes Next

The reporting raises questions that have yet to receive formal answers. What oversight mechanisms, if any, exist for monitoring how individual officers use the ELITE application? What audit trails does Palantir maintain for access to the system? And who bears accountability when an officer without a completed background investigation accesses, and potentially misuses, data drawn from health records, immigration files, and commercial databases on individuals who may include U.S. citizens?

Neither DHS nor Palantir has addressed these questions publicly. Congressional oversight of these arrangements has been limited. And the hiring surge that created the conditions for this situation shows no signs of reversal.

For the current ICE officers who spoke to The Intercept, the concern is both professional and personal. They work alongside colleagues whose backgrounds remain unverified, using a tool whose data reaches into the most sensitive corners of federal records — and the system, as designed, gave those colleagues access from day one.

This article draws on reporting from The Intercept, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.