One of the main tools the Trump administration is using in its campaign against immigration is the collection of personal data. The line between citizens’ right to privacy regarding sensitive information and the Department of Homeland Security’s acquisition of data collected by private companies has become blurred in recent months, due to the sharing of personal information between government agencies and the proliferation of opaque contracts with companies like Palantir. This U.S.-based software company, specializing in big data analytics and artificial intelligence, has designed specific programs to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in its efforts to identify and locate both undocumented immigrants and anyone critical of the agency’s operations.
“The Trump administration has dramatically expanded the scope and scale of data sharing among federal agencies in a way we haven’t seen before,” says Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight. This watchdog organization has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), ICE, the IRS, and other government agencies for failing to respond to its request for information about data handling under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
“Information that U.S. citizens provided for entirely different purposes — such as filing taxes, accessing healthcare, or applying for benefits like food assistance — is now being centralized and repurposed to support immigration enforcement. This consolidation has the potential to create a powerful surveillance infrastructure, enabling the tracking and profiling of both immigrants and U.S. citizens,” Chukwu adds.
Concerns about the fate of citizens’ sensitive data have skyrocketed since Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 mandating the sharing of personal data between government agencies. Private and sensitive information from the IRS and Medicare was transferred to the DHS to support the deportation campaign.
In this context of government surveillance, Congress recently extended for 45 days a controversial spying program known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows intelligence agencies to intercept the electronic communications of foreign nationals located outside the United States. It is considered a loophole in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which protects individuals against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, guaranteeing the security of their persons, homes, papers, and effects. It prohibits warrants without probable cause and applies to all individuals, regardless of their immigration status.
“The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is meant to protect Americans from foreign threats. But it’s also making it easier for your own government to spy on you without a warrant. Trump wants to spy on you. I’m fighting to stop him,” Oregon Senator Ron Wyden wrote on social media.
The Democratic lawmaker, along with New York Democratic Representatives Dan Goldman and Nydia Velázquez, sent a letter in April to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, signed by 30 lawmakers, demanding answers regarding the continued use of technologies developed by Palantir to collect Americans’ personal data and fuel a mass surveillance ecosystem.
“Public reporting regarding DHS’ data analytics tools and software raise serious concerns about Palantir-developed technologies being used to compile, aggregate, and analyze large volumes of personal data and information. These data-compiling systems reportedly allow DHS personnel to link individual profiles to addresses, phone numbers, devices, and other identifying information across multiple datasets in order to generate leads and identify potential locations of persons sought for immigration enforcement actions,” they wrote.
The members of Congress referred to the Elite app (an acronym for Enhanced Identification and Selection of Leads for Law Enforcement), created by Palantir, which identifies neighborhoods and geographic areas where people with immigration backgrounds might be found and which they describe as “kind of like Google Maps,” although with questionable reliability.
“Even more troubling, Palantir-developed tools are not the only technologies being deployed by your department to fulfill the administration’s mass deportation campaign and daily arrest quotas,” they noted. The Department of Homeland Security, through private contractors, has used facial recognition systems developed by Clearview AI, social media monitoring and analytics tools produced by PenLink, Stingray technology from vendors such as L3Harris, and cell phone surveillance technologies created by Paragon Solutions. “These tools contribute to a mass surveillance ecosystem that appears to operate in conjunction with Palantir-developed platforms and ultimately support enforcement operations conducted” by the DHS, the lawmakers stated.
Since 2015, federal agencies have been prohibited from collecting mass data on U.S. citizens. The legislation arose after former Homeland Security contractor Edward Snowden leaked classified information about how the agency collected Americans’ phone records. To circumvent this legal barrier, the government purchases databases created by private companies and routinely uses them for commercial purposes.
“While companies can manipulate you, they cannot put you in jail. But the U.S. government can, and it now purchases massive quantities of your information from commercial data brokers,” said Anne Toomey McKenna, a professor at Penn State University’s Institute for Computational and Data Science, in a recent article for The Conversation.
The Trump administration has also turned to technology companies like Google, Reddit, and Meta to obtain user information. Requesting personal data from companies has been common practice in cases such as child trafficking, but now it is being used to identify critics of ICE and Border Patrol immigration operations. Recently, the government subjected Reddit to a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., to reveal the identity of a user who had been critical on the social network about the actions of the federal agent who fatally shot U.S. citizen Renee Good in Minneapolis in January.
In addition to concerns about where citizens’ data ends up, critics denounce the relationships between the companies benefiting from these contracts and the government. American Oversight, in its lawsuit, points out that Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel is a close friend of Trump, and that CEO Alex Karp donated $1 million to MAGA, the ultraconservative movement that supports the Republican. Furthermore, it emphasizes that while the company has signed contracts with previous administrations, during Trump’s second term, it obtained federal contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars for a variety of services — including artificial intelligence and data analytics — with multiple federal agencies.
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