The woman’s offense was watching. She observed immigration enforcement operations and posted what she saw, and for that, according to court records newly unsealed, federal agents entered her photograph and license plate into a database built by Palantir Technologies. When she crossed the border, she was pulled aside for a second inspection. The records say that is how it will be for her until January 2027.
The records were reviewed by WIRED, which reported on the filings in a long-running lawsuit over government surveillance of people who monitor U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The filings show that Department of Homeland Security personnel logged photos, license plates and other details of ICE observers into an “investigative case management” database built by Palantir, the data-analytics company co-founded by Peter Thiel.
One observer, the filings say, has been flagged for secondary inspection every time she crosses the border, a requirement set to run until January 2027. Plaintiffs in the case also describe agents driving past the homes of protesters in what they call an effort to intimidate. A DHS spokesperson said the case is without merit.
The disclosures drew a response from Congress within days. Reps. Dan Goldman and Nydia Velázquez and Sen. Ron Wyden are among 30 lawmakers who signed a letter demanding that ICE and DHS explain how far Palantir’s technology reaches into the monitoring of activists, journalists and legal observers. The letter asks the agencies to spell out the scope of the database and who gets entered into it.
The fight has its roots in the Trump administration’s first term, when ICE began rolling out Palantir’s case-management software across its field offices. The company’s work with the agency has drawn criticism for years, from activists who accuse it of enabling deportations and, at times, from its own employees, who petitioned against the contract. This new filing adds a sharper claim: that the system is being used not just to manage cases but to track people whose only role is to watch what the government does.
Palantir’s government work has grown steadily since the company was founded in 2003, and its contracts with ICE date to the agency’s early adoption of its case-management tools. Alex Karp, the chief executive, has defended the ICE work in blunt terms, arguing that the company sells software to democratic governments and that refusing such contracts would be a political act of its own. The company has grown into one of the most valuable software firms in the country on the strength of that government business.
Palantir has long said it builds the software and does not decide who is entered into it. The distinction matters to the company’s business, which has grown quickly as government agencies adopt its tools. It also matters legally. The plaintiffs argue that logging observers into a database and subjecting them to repeated border checks amounts to retaliation against protected activity, a First Amendment question that a court will eventually have to weigh.
The stakes extend beyond one agency. Palantir’s government business has expanded across defense, intelligence and immigration work, and its stock has become one of the most visible bets on the marriage of software and national security. How the company handles questions about the ICE database will be watched by other agencies weighing similar purchases, and by investors trying to gauge whether the criticism carries any commercial cost.
Immigration court observers are a fixture of the border, a mix of legal-aid workers, journalists and volunteers who sit in hearings and watch enforcement operations to document what happens. Their presence is protected speech, their defenders argue, and the lawsuit contends that logging them into a government database is a way of making that watching costly. If a court agrees, the case would draw a boundary on how far an agency can go in treating its watchers as subjects.
For the people named in the filings, the immediate concern is narrower. They argue that a record in a government database, even one built for case management, follows a person in ways that are hard to undo, and that the secondary inspections are the visible edge of a larger apparatus. The lawsuit is their attempt to force the government to say, in public and under oath, what it has collected and why.
The agencies have until their reply is due to answer the lawmakers, and the court will decide whether the claims can proceed. What WIRED’s review has already done is put a specific, dated set of records in front of the public, showing that the dispute over Palantir and ICE is no longer about software alone. It is about whether watching the government is enough to land a person in its files.
