Palantir Held a Hack Week to Add New Controls to Software Used by ICE

Palantir hosted a hack week this spring to try to turn internal consternation over the company’s work with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into clearer oversight tools for products used in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, according to material reviewed by WIRED. The new tools provide organizations, including DHS and ICE, more information on how their workers use Palantir software. Organizations can set up alerts for “concerning behavior,” like exfiltrating datasets, and search the session logs of individual users. They also allow organizations to see which users have viewed specific sets of information. Palantir declined to comment. Palantir regularly holds hack weeks, challenging engineers from across the company to experiment with and solve problems in its products. This hack week focused on Palantir’s work with DHS and ICE, which has come under fire from both external critics and workers who fear the company’s tools are empowering the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. “This effort embodies the culture of the Palantir that I choose to work at,” Ted Mabrey, head of Palantir’s commercial business, wrote in an email to staff in early May. “You have the option to slam cynical emojis in slack channels, distrust your colleagues, and choose to think that narrative-motivated outsiders lying about Palantir’s work are more honest than the people showing up to do that work every day. Or you can have the courage to engage and innovate.” Bringing together employees from across Palantir, this year’s hack week focused on building new tools to provide additional oversight over user behavior on platforms like Foundry, the company’s data integration and analysis tool. Palantir’s work with ICE has grown enormously over the last year. Last year, WIRED reported that ICE paid the company $30 million to build a product called “ImmigrationOS” that would provide “near real-time visibility” on self-deportations out of the US. It’s also been reported that the company built a separate tool called Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) that creates maps of individuals who have been targeted for deportation. Some of the new tools created during hack week have already been deployed, with others set to roll out later this year, according to an email reviewed by WIRED. (“These tools materially expand the usability of Audit logs and checkpoints,” wrote one team lead, “not just on [Palantir’s DHS contract], but anywhere Foundry operates in high-sensitivity environments.”) Got a Tip? Are you a current or former Palantir worker who wants to talk about what's happening? We'd like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact the reporter securely on Signal at makenakelly.32. “This hack week demonstrated that Palantir can convert internal attention around work [on the DHS contract] into additional platform-level safeguards,” the team lead wrote in the May email. “Rather than turning away from challenging work, commercial FDEs [forward deployed engineers] across the company wanted to jump into the breach.” Palantir’s involvement with ICE faced harsh internal backlash earlier this year after Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents. Internal Slack chats reviewed by WIRED showed employees questioning the ethics behind the work and demanding more transparency into it. “Can Palantir put any pressure on ICE at all?” one worker wrote at the time. “I’ve read stories of folks rounded up who were seeking asylum with no order to leave the country, no criminal record, and consistently check in with authorities. Literally no reason to be rounded up. Surely we aren’t helping do that?”