ICE are using a terrifying Palantir app to hunt their targets

Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs are using a special app — known as ELITE — to track would-be targets. The developer behind the technology should come as no surprise to anyone…the genocide-linked tech firm Palantir. The app provides ICE agents with digital map and features a ‘confidence score’ to measure how accurately it can locate a target’s address. This will only fuel the witch-hunt against immigrants and refugees,

The story was originally reported by 404 Media, and later by the New Republic after obtaining a leaked user manual.

Commenting on its contents, the New Republic described the app as:

a targeting tool designed to improve capabilities for identifying and prioritizing high-value targets through advanced analytics. [It] provides ICE agents with a digital map populated by potential deportation targets, each of which has their own detailed dossier, including information such as their name, date of birth, Alien Registration Number (a unique identifier assigned by the U.S. government), and a photograph of the target.

It all seems to suggest that Trump’s private army — which has attracted fascist boot-boys from far-right groups — has gamified the life-or-death struggles of ICE’s targets.

How ICE track their victims

Some of the details are truly disturbing. Reportedly the app has “Geospatial Lead Sourcing Tab”:

allows ICE agents to select targets based on a number of criteria, including “Bios & IDs,” “Criminality,” “Location,” and “Operations.

Agents can:

select individual targets or multiple targets at once by drawing a shape around a selected area.

More information came out in a court hearing in January 2025:

During a sworn deposition earlier this month about a “dragnet” raid in Woodburn, Oregon, an officer with ICE’s Fugitive Operations Unit said that agents used the app to find target-rich areas.

That anonymous individual said:

You’re going to go to a more dense population rather than … like, if there’s one pin at a house and the likelihood of them actually living there is like 10 percent … you’re not going to go there.

Partners in crime

In October 2025, the New Republic showed how ICE was building a social media tracking team. This comes as the American Immigration Council highlighted Palantir’s long history of developing surveillance tools — like ‘Gotham,’ ‘Falcon,’ and ‘Foundry’—for ICE and other branches of the US security apparatus. These are contributing directly to the war on immigrants and refugees in Trump’s America.

Palantir is complicit in the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Disturbingly, the company also has a hand in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), as the supplier of data systems. Oh, there’s also a high-stakes military contract, worth GBP 750 million, awarded to Palantir by Keir Starmer’s Labour government.

Palantir operates wherever there is pain and suppression, and does so purely for profit. All the while, it claims that it only builds the tools, but doesn’t make the rules. It’s pervasive presence in everything from genocide, to healthcare to violent immigration crackdowns, should disturb us all.

Featured image via the Canary