Palantir Defends Work With ICE to Staff Following Killing of Alex Pretti

After the federal agents on Saturday, Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti was shot and killed. Palantir employees have been pushing for answers from management about the company’s work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — and many have questioned whether Palantir should be involved with the agency. The leaders defended their work as improving, in part, “the operational effectiveness of ICE.”

Internal Slack messages reviewed by WIRED reveal growing frustration within Palantir regarding its dealings with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and particularly with ICE’s enforcement and investigative teams. In response, Palantir’s privacy and civil liberties team posted an update to the company’s internal wiki detailing its work on federal immigration enforcement, arguing that “technology is making a difference in mitigating risk while enabling targeted outcomes.”

In a Slack thread posted Saturday discussing Pretti’s killing, Palantir employees questioned both the ethics and business logic of the company’s continued work with ICE.

“Our involvement in ice cream has been kept too low internally under Trump2. We need to understand our involvement here,” one person wrote.

“Can Palantir put pressure on ICE? wrote another. “I’ve read stories of people being arrested seeking asylum with no orders to leave the country, no criminal records, and constantly reporting to authorities. Literally no reason to be arrested. Surely we’re not contributing to that?”

The discussion took place on a company-wide Slack channel dedicated to general coverage of global news. Posts viewed by WIRED received dozens of “+1” emoji responses from other workers apparently supporting demands for more information about Palantir’s relationship with ICE. Palantir did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment.

On Sunday, Courtney Bowman, Palantir’s global director of privacy and civil liberties engineering, responded to the avalanche of questions from employees by linking to the company’s internal wiki describing its DHS and immigration enforcement contracts. The post — last updated, as WIRED reviewed it, on Jan. 24 by Akash Jain, whose LinkedIn lists him as chief technology officer and president of Palantir USG, which works with U.S. government agencies — states that in April 2025, Palantir began a six-month pilot project supporting ICE in three main areas: “Prioritization and targeting of enforcement operations,” “Self-deportation tracking” and ” Immigration lifecycle operations focused on logistics planning and execution.”

These features align with a $30 million contract that ICE awarded Palantir in April for a platform called ImmigrationOS. According to contract information provided by DHS at the time, the system would give ICE “near real-time visibility” into people who are self-deporting and help the agency identify and screen people for deportation. According to Palantir’s wiki, the pilot for these services was renewed in September for an additional six months, and tracking of self-evictions “is integrated into the work of prioritizing and targeting enforcement operations.”

Palantir also launched a new pilot project with United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to help officials “identify fraudulent benefit claims,” ​​the wiki says. The Trump administration has used allegations of fraud to justify ICE’s increased presence in cities like Minneapolis.

“There have been growing and increasingly visible field operations focused on domestic immigration enforcement that continue to draw attention to Palantir’s involvement with ICE,” the wiki says. “We believe our work could have a real, positive impact on ICE’s enforcement operations by providing officers and agents with the data needed to make more accurate and informed decisions. We are committed to providing our partners with the best software for their work, while recognizing the reputational risk we face when supporting immigration enforcement operations.”

The wiki acknowledges “increasing reports of U.S. citizens being arrested and detained in enforcement actions, as well as reports of racial profiling allegedly being used as a pretext for the detention of some U.S. citizens,” but says Palantir’s customers at ICE “remain committed to avoiding unlawful/unnecessary targeting, apprehension, and detention of U.S. citizens wherever possible.”